[dundee] Upgrading PHP version

[James Le Cuirot]

Hi Chris,

I'd avoid building PHP from source at all, if possible. It has so many
different extensions, many of which you may be using. Each extension
will likely require some library and its associated headers. Chances
are you don't have the headers installed and ensuring you have all the
right ones could prove time consuming. Find out which distro it is and
then find out if there's a package for the version you need, preferably
official but unofficial would still be better than building from source
yourself. Hopefully the extension will have been included in the
package. Binary distros tend to enable most of the options just in
case. It's because of things like this that I recommend Gentoo but feel
free to ignore me there. (-; To give you some idea of how many
extensions PHP has, check out the number of USE flags Gentoo has for
it. It's probably has the most of any package in Gentoo. The ones not
marked with - are the ones I have enabled.

berkdb bzip2 cgi cli crypt ctype curl exif ftp gd gdbm iconv imap json
mysql mysqli ncurses pcre posix postgres readline reflection session
simplexml soap sockets spell spl sqlite ssl sysvipc threads truetype
unicode xml xpm xsl zip zlib (-adabas) -apache2 -bcmath (-birdstep)
-calendar -cdb -cjk -concurrentmodphp -curlwrappers -db2 -dbase
(-dbmaker) -debug -discard-path -doc (-empress) (-empress-bcs) (-esoob)
-fastbuild (-fdftk) -filter (-firebird) -flatfile -force-cgi-redirect
(-frontbase) -gd-external -gmp -hash -inifile -interbase -iodbc -ipv6
-java-external -kerberos -ldap -ldap-sasl -libedit -mcve -mhash -msql
-mssql -nls -oci8 -oci8-instant-client -odbc -pcntl -pdo -pdo-external
-pic -qdbm -recode -sapdb -sharedext -sharedmem -snmp (-solid) -suhosin
(-sybase) (-sybase-ct) -tidy -tokenizer -wddx -xmlreader -xmlrpc
-xmlwriter -yaz -zip-external

Oh, another thing, I'm not sure about Red Hat or Debian but some
distros package Apache's mod_php separately. It's essentially a
different program from the CLI and CGI versions of PHP. Gentoo handles
them all in the one package (through the apache2, cli, cgi flags) but
has to build each version in turn.

Hope that didn't scare you too much
Chewi


On Wed, 12 Sep 2007 12:43:45 +0100
"chris wyllie" <cgwyllie at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Hello folks,
> 
> I'm hoping somebody can kinda roughly guide me through upgrading the
> PHP version on a server via SSH. Currently the server's version is
> 5.1.6 and I need access to the hooks implemented in version 5.2.x and
> the APC extension. I think the server is running Red Hat or Fedora
> but I could be wrong. I know it's not Debian.
> 
> Is it as simple as untaring the source and the usual
> configure>make>make install steps or is there more to it? Also, once
> configure>make>upgraded, is installing the
> APC extension difficult?
> 
> Thanks in advance for any help :) I'd be willing to look at
> alternatives too if somebody can suggest any.
> 
>   Chris