Anyone installing PHP is likely to be doing so on a webserver. The odds are
that they aren't running X, or any GUI on that server at all. It's often
a colo server in a datacenter, accessed via ssh. There's no graphical
web browser running on that box.
Given that, the only reasonable way to download a distribution to that
box is using a command line tool such as curl. The php.net mirror site
chooser defeats that by refusing to divulge a working URL that can be
cut and pasted into another window.
It would be a nice enhancement to display a final download URL for each
mirror.
Do you start from http://php.net/ when you download PHP?
Yes. After a couple of clicks I end up at, say, http://us3.php.net/get/php-4.3.3.tar.bz2/from/a/mirror. It's from
there that it'd be nice to see direct download URLs (if they're already
there, and I'm missing them, my apologies, but I wasn't able to find
anything).
You needed to make a few clicks to get to here, so I don't know what is the problem with this page. One of the first few links on the page points to a place where you can get the file. It is not a direct location to the file, but wget should be able to handle that.
Goba