Re: Question wrt dual-PEAR

On Monday 31 January 2005 02:34 pm, Pierre Habouzit wrote: > Hi, I'm interested into PEAR packaging for debian (I'm currently near > to be Debian Developper [1]). > > I'm really interested into web apps packaging in debian, and mostly in > php which is the language I use the most for web apps. The thing is > that (IMHO) php, especially PEAR isn't in a very good shape in debian. > > Our major problem is that We (I say *we* because I've talk a bit with > PHP debian maintainer that are /de/ /facto/ PEAR maintainer atm) do not > have found any good way to maintain two branch of PEAR on the same box. > I'll explain : > > * we have PEAR libraries that are in real debian packages that live > in /usr/share/php/ > > * OTOH we would like to have a way to allow a user to install with the > 'pear' command his packages into /usr/local/share/php, without > having to duplicate the whole /usr/share/php tree. > I'm not sure about the PEAR installer, but general policy for including files in PEAR packages is to use the path from the php_dir down. e.g. require_once 'DB/mysql.php' so once stuff gets installed, it should be fine, as long as the include_path has both install directories. The installer is another issue entirely, and I'm not familiar enough with it to say how it works or how you can have it's dependencies fulfilled. I suspect that what would need to happen to make this work is that it would need to be modified to support multiple php_dirs. e.g. php_dir = /usr/share/php:/usr/local/share/php with a registry in each, the combination of which is used to fulfill dependencies. This will probably cause problems if, for example, you have DB version x.0.y in /usr/share/php, and you upgrade to x.1.y in /usr/local/share/php.