PHP/MapScript on Debian and Ubuntu

[Steven Monai]

Hello, all (but especially the PHP/MapScript devs):

Before I go to the trouble of trying to contact the Debian package
maintainers, I'm posting my question here first, just in case someone in the
Mapserver community has any information. 

Everything I've seen on this list over the past few years has indicated that
the best way to run PHP/MapScript is in CGI mode. Yet the Debian package
maintainers seem to be under the impression that PHP/MapScript is most
stable running in an Apache2 DSO, even going so far as to patch
PHP/MapScript so that it refuses to run in a CGI (or even a CLI)
environment. Does anyone have any idea why Debian's 'php5-mapscript' package
maintainers have done this? Do they know something that I/we don't? Is
PHP/MapScript not stable in PHP5 when run as CGI/CLI?

I really would like to be able to run ka-map's 'precache2.php' script from
the command line in Debian (or Ubuntu) without having to compile my own
php_mapscript.so.

Regards,
-SM
--