PHP - A waste of time/resources?

All, For those of you out there, trying your hardest to make PHP work with anything other than Red Hat Linux and Apache, give up now. If you cant make it work on your own, don't expect any help from this list or the developers. They claim it to work great on other UNIX platforms and Web Servers, but they fail to provide any straightforward information on all the hackjobs and 3rd party tools you need, let alone the fact that chances are, it wont work anyway. My department has spent months learning the ins and outs of PHP, and when we got a nice new HP-UX box (September), we have been working trying to make any version of PHP compile and run with iPlanet. Sure, I hear you say, "use Apache". or "Use Solaris". No. I was informed that PHP would work just fine with both. From the get go, I had numerous problems. I will ignore those relating to 3rd party tools such as gcc, since that is something our system needs anyway. I did ask for help from the list, and for the first few issues, I received quite responsive help, something I am greatly appreciative of. When It came to this last problem, not one could/would help. So I turned to php's Bugs Tracker. What a joke that is. I notice that linux or apache related "issues" get a quick response, but forget seeing any response for something else. I once would back open source software to management, always they tried to counter with something of the sort "but we cannot get support for free software". I always would try and convince them that there are plenty of message boards, support lists, and bugtrackers to turn to, but I was proven wrong this time, burnt bad, and I will probably have this whole mess thrown in my face next time around. If anyone wants to prove me wrong, and thinks they can help, drop me a line. I, personally, would like to see this work. After all, I think I would rather move on than rewrite our many projects in Java or some equally defective language. Else, I still wish the developers good luck, but try to provide (at least) better documentation. Thanks for letting me rant, ---------- Scott Winkle Web Developer Phone: (937) 327-7478 swinkle@wittenberg.edu Web Team / Wittenberg University Computing Center