Re: Question wrt dual-PEAR

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.

So, you would like each user in a multi-user situation, or a superuser? If you wish a superuser to install, the best solution is to distribute a file with debian, /root/.pearrc. This file would define the install directories to be /usr/local/share/php/XXX. Creating this file is somewhat risky in the sense that some users may already have a .pearrc file in /root. Would debian be smart enough to not modify an existing .pearrc? To set up the default .pearrc, you would use a command like so: $ pear -c /root/.pearrc -d php_dir=/usr/local/share/php/php -d data_dir = /usr/local/share/php/data ..... -s Replace .... with more -d blah_dir=/usr/local/share/php/blah Then, when the user does $ pear list PEAR will first check the .pearrc file, and then check the system-wide pear.conf file. This will only work for root, so you would need to create .pearrc files in the ~ directory for each superuser that needs this facility. If you wish to have each user install pear in a multi-user situation, then you would want to do the same thing for each user, except have it install into /usr/local/share/username/php and make sure the permissions are set up with the user management tool. Does this answer the question? It would be great to have better debian support for PEAR, please ask any time if there is something that we can do. Greg