[Mapserver-users] --with-php, Mapserver 4.0.1, and Fedora

[Daniel Morissette]

Lindsay C. Blanton wrote:
> 
> Is there anything in the overall architecture preventing you guys from
> developing this to run in the standard PHP/Apache configurations that so
> many people run (as a module)?
> 

Yes and no.

The good news is that the 4.1 CVS version (to be released as 4.2) should 
be able to run with PHP as a module in theory, but the bad news are that 
it's almost impossible to build that combination at the moment without 
tweaking the build process manually.  Unfortunately PHP isn't very 
friendly to large extension modules that come with lots of dependencies 
such as PHP MapScript.

The main issues are that PHP comes with its own bundled copy of regex 
and GD which are also used by MapServer, and unless you build the 
MapServer core with the exact same versions of GD and regex then you end 
up with symbol conflicts at runtime and odd behavior/crashes.  If you 
build PHP from source then you can get it to use the system GD, but you 
_cannot_ force PHP to use the system regex when you build it as an 
Apache module... this is a major issue for us.  Plus if you got the php 
and php-devel RPM then chances are that they use PHP's bundled GD and 
then you have two problems.

I'm still pulling my hair trying to find a nice way to solve that 
problem... that's one of the main issues that I would like to resolve 
before the 4.2 release.

Note that I don't expect the 4.2 release version to be extremely 
tested/stable under the PHP module configuration... this mode should 
still be considered experimental for the 4.2 release, and will hopefully 
become more stable in a later release closer to the summer.

Daniel
-- 
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  Daniel Morissette               dmorissette at dmsolutions.ca
  DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
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