Re: Package dependencies

Jon Parise wrote: > > Does anyone have thoughts on the best way to handle dependencies > between PEAR packages and PHP extensions? I think we should deal with runtime dependencies between PEAR packages (written in PHP) and PHP extensions brutally. If you don't have the extension and the package is not able to load it, die. During installation however, PEAR should be more helpful. If you don't have an extension installed, you should be prompted if you want to install it now, if it exists in PEAR. Build-time dependencies is where it starts getting hairy, since we are often dealing with external libraries. There is a "configure" command, but the install script needs to proxy the options to the user somehow during the install process. Can probably be done by extracting PHP_ARG_(WITH|ENABLE) options from config.m4 and prompting the same questions. Also, we need a better way of loading extensions than we have today. The manual OS check ("windows or something else" test) is not very robust, we need to get the shared library file suffix from the build process somehow (not all Unix'es use .so, HP-UX use[sd] .so and AIX use[sd] .a(!)). We could add a "SHARED_LIB_SUFFIX" or implement a "load this extension" wrapper function, in PHP. - Stig