I’ve got a lot of feedback on the instructions I posted on compiling PHP5 on Mac OS X. First reactions where about the PEAR installation problem which I missed completely (as I haven’t used PEAR yet, forgot to test this). Secondly I got a lot of feedback on the use of the options, extensions and libraries I had chosen. Some where obsolete, not in use anymore or replaced by newer ones. I’ll try to explain why this happened:

I had started compiling PHP on the Mac starting with PHP4, I had found some outdated instructions on how to compile it on Mac which with a little tweaking got it to work. Changing that to instructions on how to compile PHP5 looked pretty straightforward. But I haven’t actively developed in PHP for a year or two and completely missed the changes that happened between PHP4 and PHP5. Which meant that I missed some of the details that where needed to get a proper PHP5 working environment.

Thanks to all the feedback and the email conversations I had I think I’ve got a proper basic setup as it is now. After I’m done with rewriting the mail-server documentation so it reflects the changes I made to, for instance, the MySQL install paths. I’m going to try to document installing more options and libraries that people might like to use with their PHP installation.

If you have any ideas or comments on this PHP installation let me know, I’m always open to suggestions.