philosophical question

[Reuben D. Budiardja]

On Tuesday 09 March 2004 07:26 am, Tom Westheimer wrote:
> I have a RH 7.0 website that I am trying to upgrade to use latest PHP
> and MYSQL.  In order to use another program on my website.
>
> I downloaded the latest PHP source and get errors that my Apache is not
> DSO and Perl is not up to date.

Did you installed the Apache from source or from RPM ? In anycase, it seems 
that you need to recompile Apache from source to have that enabled. I don't 
remember how it was compiled with RPM. RedHat 7.0 is kinda old, and it's no 
longer supported now. I don't know what version of PHP/Apache is bundled with 
it or with its latest update, but if you want to stick with it, it may worth 
your while to upgrade your Apache / PHP and compile from source, both for 
security and features reason.

I don't know why Perl should have anything to do with compiling PHP. What kind 
of error do you get? The only thing is that if you have mod_perl in Apache 
from RPM install, when you recompile Apache, you may break that one, but 
maybe not (not quite sure there, I never use mod_perl to be honest).

> Also re Apache do I create a DSO version of 1.3 or create a 2.0
> version?  It all seems such a web of dependencies!!

I would stick with the latest Apache-1.3.x right now. But if you're 
adventurous and really need feature from Apache-2 that you can try it. IIRC, 
PHP website says that it should not be used in production with Apache-2 
(yet).

> My philosophical  question is how does one tackle getting everyting up
> to date when installing new modules??   So I guess I am looking for some
> general guidelines that should be used.

I don't know if there's any hard and fast rules for this. If you want to avoid 
having to do a lot of this manually, then stick with what the distro provides 
you. Do a distro upgrades once in a while. For example, Fedora release cycle 
is about 6-8 months, keeping it more current with those mainstream project. 
While Redhat Enterprise offers alonger release cycle for stability. If either 
of that gives you what you need great. Otherwise, you'll probably have to do 
some of those updates manually (ie. compile yourself from source, etc) rather 
than depending on distro release. It'll take some practice, but it's not 
impossible. 

Hope that helps.

Reuben D. Budiardja

-- 
Reuben D. Budiardja
Department of Physics and Astronomy
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN
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