#19091: php5: refactor variants into separate ports -------------------------------------+-------------------------------------- Reporter: ryandesign@… | Owner: ryandesign@… Type: enhancement | Status: new Priority: Normal | Milestone: Port Enhancements Component: ports | Version: 1.7.0 Keywords: | Port: php5, php5-devel -------------------------------------+-------------------------------------- There are too many variants in the php5 port and I want to eliminate most if not all of them by breaking them out into separate ports. Variants are inconvenient because if you want to add one you have to rebuild the whole port, which for php5 takes some time. Also, ports can't depend on variants of other ports (#126). Also, once we start building and distributing binaries of ports, each additional available variant increases exponentially the number of combinations that would need to be built. If we instruct the build server only to build a few common variant combinations, then users of other variants would miss out on the benefits of using binaries. The php5 port has two kinds of variants: SAPI variants and extension variants. The SAPIs are cli (always on), fastcgi (+fastcgi variant; becomes always on in php 5.3.0), and apache (which should, considering #14001 and #17678, be available in flavors for Apple Apache 1 (Mac OS X < 10.5), MacPorts Apache 1 (apache port), Apple Apache 2 (Mac OS X >= 10.5), MacPorts Apache 2 (apache2 port), and MacPorts Apache 2.0 (apache20 port). The extension variants enable specific PHP functionality such as access to databases, graphics libraries, etc. We should begin by moving the extension variants to separate ports, so that once we start breaking the SAPIs into their own ports, they won't have to duplicate all the extension variants. Precedent: FreeBSD has separate ports for separate php5 extensions. Their system seems to be based on Makefiles and their php5 extension ports just include a master php5 extension Makefile ([http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/lang/php5/Makefile.ext Makefile.ext]); for MacPorts, this should be a portgroup. And all the special-case code for the various extensions in their Makefile.ext would be overrides in the individual extension portfiles for us. Some more info on compiling php extensions as dynamic libraries instead of statically building it into the php binaries is [http://jehiah.cz/archive /compiling-shared-php-modules here]. Note the comment from Nico about using "`make build-modules`" instead of just "`make`" to make the build go more quickly. We'll also need to compile php to load extra .ini files from an additional directory, like ${prefix}/etc/php.d, where each php extension port can put a pre-written .ini file which enables that module. I believe this is the "`--with-config-file-scan-dir`" configure option. -- Ticket URL: <http://trac.macports.org/ticket/19091> MacPorts <http://www.macports.org/> Ports system for Mac OS