[PHP-DOC] Configure options in the docs... From: Lars Torben Wilson (torben <email protected>)
Date: 09/11/00

Today I ran into a note in the errata which requested a complete
listing in the manual of all PHP configuration options. I found that
there was a list (in the Unix install page), but that it wasn't
complete, and didn't mention any differences between PHP 3
configuration and PHP 4 configuration.

I wrote a quick PHP 4 script which parses the output from both
configure scripts and generates a variablelist from the data, along
with notes as to which versions of PHP the option works with. For
instance, sample output after compiling the docs looks (something)
like:

--with-mhash[=DIR]

     PHP 3, PHP 4: Include mhash support. DIR is the mhash install
     directory.

--without-pcre-regex

     PHP 3: Don't include Perl Compatible Regular Expressions support

     PHP 4: Do not include Perl Compatible Regular Expressions
     support. Use --with-pcre-regex=DIR to specify DIR
     where PCRE's include and library files are located, if not using
     bundled library.

--without-posix

     PHP 3: Don't include POSIX functions

     PHP 4: Option not available in PHP 4

I don't envision a scenario where this script would need to be run
every time the docs are generated, since there are a huge number of
options (147, all told), and I simply directed the output to a file
which I then inserted verbatim into the manual. And most of the
options are likely to remain fairly stable, anyway. At this point,
this simply gets us a complete, current list from which to start. One
reason that it wouldn't be worth trying to generate this list
programmatically all the time is that there are several points at
which human additions would be useful--for instance, to keep people
from freaking out when they see that --with-ftp doesn't work in PHP 4
(it's become --enable-ftp, btw).

Unless, of course, we wanted to fix all of the configuration option in
the config scripts. :) I already had to do some typo correction in the
configure.in's to get it working anyway...

Another thing I found was that including this list in the installation
page itself makes the page ridiculously long, so I split it out into a
different sect1.

Since putting these changes together involves some largish changes to
pages someone else originally wrote, I'm looking for comments before I
commit. If I don't get any, I'll commit in a few hours anyway, and
roll it back tomorrow if it's a huge problem.

If anyone wants to preview this, and example manual is available
online at http://www.thebuttlesschaps.com/phpdoc/. All the relevant
bits are in Getting Started|Installation, in the 'Installation on UNIX
systems' and the 'Complete list of configure options' sections.

Comments? 

-- 
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|Torben Wilson <torben <email protected>>                     Netmill iTech|
|http://www.coastnet.com/~torben            http://www.netmill.fi|
|Ph: 1 250 383-9735                             torben <email protected>|
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