Project for someone with time on their hands

Hammer65

On Mozilla.org they have a form that can assist in setting up parameters for compiling Firefox.

It occurred to me that it would be pretty nice to have this sort of thing for PHP (4 and 5). In other words, a kind of ./configure wizard for the long list of options and extensions. I wish I had time for something like this but I'm also not as experienced as some are at PHP installations.

Just an idea.

thorpe

./configure --help

piersk

arf

Hammer65

funny, but the point was in order to include all the extensions and settings necessary anymore the ./configure line gets a little long. Having a quick way to generate it might be nice. Most other languages don't require such an extensive number of command argumants to compile.

I'm a developer, I don't have a lot of time on my hands and compiling new PHP versions with new extensions and typing out endless strings of "with-xxx" isn't always a good use of my time. Why do you think so many people are moving to Ruby and Rails these days.

I know very well how to get information on compliling thank you very much.

thorpe

Um... and ruby has less extensions libraries?

Hammer65

It does but you don't deal with it at compile time. Same with Perl and Python.

Look if you like typing out all that everytime something changes, fine, but I've heard plenty of developers complain about the growing number fo options for PHP compile.

Getting it all put together without mistakes in a reasonable amount of time isn't easy if you are trying to trick out an installation with everything you might need. Add to that all the downloads, unzipping and tarring, reading documentation and release notes and that's a lot of time. I would prefer to leave it to someone else but I don't always have that opportunity. I love PHP, but I don't do this as a hobby. I have projects and deadlines and a life as well.

Not a big deal, just wanted to throw the idea out if someone wanted to try it I might be willing to help a little. Didn't think it would stick in someones craw so much.

goldbug

Hammer65 wrote:
I'm a developer, I don't have a lot of time on my hands and compiling new PHP versions with new extensions and typing out endless strings of "with-xxx" isn't always a good use of my time. Why do you think so many people are moving to Ruby and Rails these days.

I surely hope you're not typing out your configure statement every time you rebuild.

That's why they invented shell scripts. Put your configure statement in one. Run it many many times, even when new versions are released. Want to change something? Change just that part of the configure script, and then rebuild your little heart out.

For added flavor, throw the make and even the make install command into the shell script. Have system-installed copies of PHP you want to mask (ahem OS X), put whatever hiding/moving/masking commands you need in as well.

When I build, I rarely have to do more than a quick "./build-php.sh", then type my password at the make install phase. Done, easy as pie.

It's really quite trivial, and you only need to really mod it once every major release.

Also, if you're not aware... you can build most PHP extensions as dynamic modules, and disable/enable them via php.ini, no need to rebuild. Something you may want to look into as an alternative to the rebuild hokey-pokey.

Hammer65

Granted. However, I have had to do this on few servers that I haven't used before that have nowhere near all the extensions needed or is just a standard RPM install.

As I understand it, there is a speed penalty for dynamic inclusion but it also only works with v 5. The company I work for does a lot of installs of Open Source CMS and CRM systems as well as assorted other packages that aren't PHP 5 ready. It's only going to get worse when v 6 comes out.

I have done as you suggest with our server before but we have moved most of our work off that machine and I haven't even bothered to upgrade it lately. I just thought it might be a useful tool, not for all, but for some. Perhaps people new to the language more than others.

goldbug

Hammer65 wrote:
As I understand it, there is a speed penalty for dynamic inclusion but it also only works with v 5.

Why would there be a noticeable speed penalty when you build the libraries as shared objects? (Seriously) They should only be loaded once at the initial startup of the PHP module, basically the same as the monolithic install. Or am I way off base and smoking the crack today?

*Talking about DSO here, not to be confused with dl() or __autoload().

Also... PHP5 only? Is my brain completely fried? I could have sworn you could use =shared as a module command line switch in PHP4.

Examining the methodology....a production machine shouldn't be changing its configuration enough to where modifying a shell script becomes a chore; A development machine might be very frequently changed around, but often it's assumed that a development machine doesn't need 100% the performance of a production machine. Any (If any) performance hit on the dev box from using SOs should be outweighed by the flexibility of the configuration.

Shrike

On Debian theres a package for most things PHP. apt-get is your best friend 😉

Hammer65

Actually yes you are right I am confusing dl with inclusion via php.ini. I had read somewhere that inclusion via php.ini was v 5 only.

As far as what wervers I work on it varies. Sometimes it's a new server that the client bought to deploy the new application. Other times it's a machine that previously was not public but only had a business system on it. We don't do hosting here anymore. I understand what you mean by not touching a production machine too much but there isn't always a choice and many times we are starting over from scratch and specifying what we need and installing it.

I much prefer going to a web host so that someone can do all this for me. I have no desire to be a sys admin.