All I wanted to do was migrate my work-related forum to a new host. Here’s how it should have worked:
- Copy stuff over
- Edit configuration files
- Populate database
- rock on
Here’s how it actually worked:
- Copy stuff over
- Edit configuration files
- Populate database
- Software was unable to connect to a database because php5’s developers do not enable mysql by default. Their claim, “This won’t actually affect that many people.” Ex-squeeze me? This is like saying you’re not going to include a fuel system in an automobile, customers can install their own. Yes, that wouldn’t affect many people, if your definition of “many” is “everyone plus one more.”
- For most software, I would expect I could just plop in a runtime library, twiddle a config file, and move on. Nope. PHP’s philosophy is you need to rebuild it from scratch. They don’t make this easy, either. Just replicating the set of options my runtime non-MySQL-aware version had took several hours over a weekend of iteratively downloading, configuring, installing, cursing, updating, reconfiguring, and recursing. Thirty packages, much of the time guessing the magic name to feed to “yast” or resolving dependencies when manually compiling from source.
A few weeks after recovery, I was talking with someone else about the wiki site I host and he mentioned using XAMPP on his windows box to test site changes. Turns out they’ve done all the heavy lifting by pre-packaging all of the open source runtimes into a clean installation. It’s a pretty complete set for Linux, Windows, Mac and even Solaris.
So, there is apparently no need to struggle with the insanely stupid decision the PHP team made with PHP5 because the ApacheFriends have taken care of this.
Props to them!