Suggestion: create and distribute "installation snapshots"

Dear Friends of PHP (FoPs 8^), Thanks again to Joey Smith, who replied most helpfully to my last series of postings about difficulties getting a fully-configured "kitchen sink" version of PHP 4 going. This message tries to clarify one of the main goals of my efforts: I suggest that it would be enormously helpful to create installation "snapshots" of Apache/MySQL/PHP for specific releases of these packages on specific hardware platforms under speciic OSs. That is essentially what I am trying to do with my installation on a SPARC under Solaris 2.6 using gcc 2.95.2. Installing these systems completely can be a lengthy and daunting task. The end goal of my effort is to have explicit but pithy step-by-step instructions that lead to a successful installation. If we had snapshots for at least Solaris and Linux, I imagine we'd cover a substantial proportion of users. Such snapshots could be available through links on the PHP Web site, for example. I envisage the snapshot containing everything that is needed in one large tarball -- instructions and code. It becomes a sort of "reference installation" for the platform in question. My current snapshot directory contains the following packages: ApacheJServ_1.1b2 Apache_JMeter_1.3 JSDK_2.0 analog_3.90b apache_1.3.9 aspell_.26.2 db_3.0.55 dmalloc_4.3.0 expat_1.1 freetype_1.3.1 gd_1.7.3 gettext_0.10.35 gnujsp_1.0.0 imap_4.7a jpeg_6b mcrypt_2.2.5 mhash_0.6.1 mm_1.0.12 mod_dav_0.9.14-1.3.6 mod_perl_1.21 mod_ssl_2.4.6-1.3.9 mysql_3.22.27 openldap_1.2.9 openssl_0.9.4 pdflib_2.01 phpMyAdmin_2.0.4 php_4.0b3 readline_4.0 rmagic-1.2 rsaref_2.0 t1lib_1.0 tiff_3.4b037 ucd-snmp_4.0.1 webalizer_1.30-04 xforms_0.89 xmysql_1.10 xmysqladmin_1.0 xpm_3.4k zlib_1.1.3 and that's omitting seeral arge systems that I assume are installed separately (tcl/tk) and quasi-commercial packages requiring registration before download (webglimpse-1.7.6). Each of these directories contains a README.LOCAL file with detailed information about the package, and step-by-step installation instructions. In my next posting, I will continue the story about progress and problems with the installation, in the hope of getting further suggestions... Thanks and Cheerio, Rick Rodgers --------------------------------------------------------------------------------