SCO Openserver installation: notes+questions

This is by all means NOT an installation cookbok, but I feel like sharing my experience (problems, actually, nightmares most of the time...) in compiling PHP. My setup: SCO Openserver 5.0.5 + Apache 1.3.12, version downloaded from SCO + PHP4.0.4pl1 (as cgi) + extensions pthreads (FSU pthreads 3.5 downloaded from SCO) Oracle (client 7.3.4), sybase (freetds 0.5.1), curl (libcurl 7.6.1), ssl (openssl 0.9.6) , zlib 1.0.9 (downloaded from SCO, part of package glib 1.5), gd version 1.3 (downloaded from SCO, part of package glib 1.5) + dev tools as downloaded from SCO site, including GCC2.95.2pl1, GNU make 3.78.1, Bison 1.25 (and many more...) Being in no way knoweledgeable about automake and autoconf, I dug in the configure script every time I found something barring my way. These are the lines I changed in file configure that prevented a successful run of configure or make: 2633: LIBS = '$LIBS -l$lib -lsocket ' // to enable correct compilation of pthreads 7640 - 7657: [inverted order of inclusion of ssl and crypto, in order for ssl to work] 30258: ORACLE_SHARED_LIBADD="-lclntsh -lxa -lsql -lsqlnet -lncr -lsqlnet -lclient - lcommon -lgeneric -lsqlnet -lncr -lsqlnet -lclient -lcommon -lgeneric -lepc -lnlsrtl3 -lc3v6 -lcore3 -lnlsrtl3 -lcore3 -lnlsrtl3 -lsocket -lnsl_s -lm $ORACLE_SHARED_LIBADD" // to enable oracle extenxion 30338: LIBS="-lclntsh $LIBS -lxa -lsql -lsqlnet -lncr -lsqlnet -lclient -lcommon -lgeneric -lsqlne t -lncr -lsqlnet -lclient -lcommon -lgeneric -lepc -lnlsrtl3 -lc3v6 -lcore3 -lnlsrtl3 -lcore3 -lnlsrtl3 -lsocket -lnsl_s -lm" // same as above Similar changes had to be undertaken to allow use of extensions libpdf, sablot and mcrypt ... All in all it looks like the problem lies in the order of inclusion of libraries in the compilation commands generated by configure (in the end the compilation command I get includes -lsocket at least 3 times...). I think this is an issue with the SCO linker. Am I missing something basic (e.g. PATH variables...), or is it a woe with Openserver OS?? Shall I ask for a modification of configure file in php 4.0.5? Thanks, Gaetano Giunta