Updating, compiling and running services
A server running RedHat 9, Apache 2.4.0 and PHP 4.2 (the basic install of Redhat at the time) needed updating for development using PDFLib which requires minimum versions of PHP. We chose to upgrade PHP to 5.0.3 and then things began to get messy.
PHP 5.0.3 required a minimum version of LibXML2, Apache needed updating and eventually got to 2.0.53 The problems encountered were numerous, but mostly due to insufficient planning initially. By allowing installation disks to setup services, custom configs are not considered. Forced removal of rpm packages (using rpm -e and sometimes even –nodeps) ensued.
I have vowed to make the next install of a webserver a manual affair to take into consideration the –with’s and prefixes required for a useable / updatable LAMP (Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP) setup. So when you need to install a new module, recompiling PHP should be straightforward from whichever source you used (and retained).
