Musings on PHP

["Max Bowsher" <maxb at ukf dot net>]

I personally have no need for PHP, but I know it's a very widely used piece 
of software.

After John Morrison's recent mention of PHP in passing, I decided to do a 
quick estimate of how difficult getting PHP working on Cygwin would be. To 
cut a long story short, I got a bit carried away, and now have a functional 
apache2 php5 module.


I didn't really intend to package PHP, but having got this far, I sort of 
feel I ought to.
Which brings me to two major issues concerning any potential Cygwin PHP 
package:

1) Two apache versions.

I've no interest in Apache 1.3.x. Can I just package PHP for 2.x, and worry 
about 1.3.x only if a potential maintainer steps forward?


2) Shared library headaches.

PHP definitely needs its postgresql support available to be useful most 
non-trivial application. If I want to avoid creating a hard dependency on 
the postgresql package, the PHP pgsql extension needs to be built as a 
shared library. But to make that work for both the php command line 
executable and the apache module, I'd have to significantly tweak the PHP 
build process, introducing an extra library to contain the core PHP engine, 
instead of just linking the component object files into both the php exe and 
the apache module. So... is it worth messing with the build system to this 
extent, or should I just go the easy route, and have a hard dependency on 
postgresql's cygpq.dll?


Max.