Irritating software

[Rob Sutherland]

I know, I know, there is no irritating software, only 
irritated software users (or irritating software authors), but I've been struggling with a few examples of bad practice lately .

The whole area of PHP debugging would make Rube Goldberg
laugh, not because there are no FLOSS alternatives but 
because of things like this...

There's a guy called Dmitri Dmitrienko who wrote a package 
called dbg that allows you to debug PHP. The instructions
for installation are pretty standard...

---------
 $./configure --enable-dbg=shared \
            --with-dbg-profiler \
            --with-php-config=/path/to/php-config \
            --prefix=/usr/lib/php4
$make
$make install
-----------

but, after that is a note

----------------
NOTE: I do not recommend to install php :) In other words 
      I'd recommend to avoid running make install for PHP. 
      On many systems it will strip down
      symbol table and installed executable 
      (or shared object such as php5apache.so) will 
      be ABSOLUTELY USELESS because it will FAIL to load
----------------
<snarl>
Call me crazy, but when certain optional procedure steps can 
mess up most people, I put the step deep in an obscure 
footnote instead of leaving it in the main line. This isn't
a big problem for a developer, but I came across a number of
posts by Mac types who tried to compile it with predictable
results :-( 
</snarl>

Rob 
 

Rob Sutherland
http://www.myspace.com/gylany





      
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