Re: Configure line of PHP 5.1 port

Ryan Schmidt <[email protected]> writes:
>> I'm a user of MacOSX DarwinPorts, and used your port to install PHP  
>> 5 on
>> my Mac. I'm also a linux guru and used to install from source (or  
>> using
>> gentoo's emerge), but with my mac I wanted to try DarwinPorts. So  
>> here I
>> am. But there is one problem with the PHP port, it does not allow for
>> much configuration of the configure line. I'd like to add
>> '--enable-pdo=shared --with-pdo-sqlite=shared' for example, but there
>> are no variants for that. Do you have an easy way of doing it ? I'd  
>> like
>> not to "hack" it though, so it would be easy to reproduce on the next
>> upgrade.
>> Should I use the configure.args file ? Or maybe you could expand the
>> variants ? I can help in that regard, I compiled PHP from source a
>> hundred times for different needs, and have good knowledge of their
>> configuration options.

Yes, editing the configure.args keyword of your local copy of the PHP
portfile would be the way for you to add configure options that were not
enabled for a given port and/or not provided via variants.  As for making
options that prove to be useful for you in the port repository for all to
have, that requires some haggling with maintainers and/or users who might
or might not share the same views on the utility of the additions. 
Generally speaking we like to keep the number of variants at a minimum,
and some in our user base might not be as technical as the general Unix
crowd, so we don't favor a "support all options possible approach" which
might seem to go slightly against the grain of a typical Unix user base. 
We tend to support an approach that enables by default the set of options
that we think will meet the needs of the great majority of our user base,
and a variant or two if necessary to catch the remainder, the fewer the
better.  I also don't understand the real world benefit of a PDO option
(or including it by default) and why people would use it because I just
don't know about it and I'd like to hear more about it.

Mark