Re: A problem related to php 5.4.10 and possibly others

[Dennis Clarke]

/********** For the sake of getting this issue looked into I am going to cross 
post
 * to two maillists. Maybe the PHP folks see the issue and will reply with an 
 * update.  Who knows. 
 */

Original message to the bison mailist : 

> Le 15 janv. 2013 à 00:19, Dennis Clarke <address@hidden> a 
> écrit :
> 
> > Dear bison folks :
> 
> Hi!
> 
> > This is not really a bug but rather a question. I recently saw that 
> PHP had been updated to 5.4.10 and I decided to try building it. I was 
> quite surprised to see in the configure output this warning about 
> bison : 
> > 
> > checking for bison... bison -y
> > checking for bison version... invalid
> > configure: WARNING: bison versions supported for regeneration of the 
> Zend/PHP parsers: 1.28 1.35 1.75 1.875 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.4.1 2.4.2 
> 2.4.3 2.5 2.5.1 2.6 2.6.1 2.6.2 (found: 2.6.5).
> > 
> > 
> >    This seems odd to me as bison 2.6.5 builds and tests perfectly on 
> > my Solaris 10 server and so therefore I wonder what these PHP folks 
> > are on about?  I will look for some sort of reasonable dev list for 
> > the php folks as it would be a good idea to get some input from them. 
> > Any reply from the bison team would be appreciated also. 
> 


[ from Akim Demaille on bison maillist ] 
> I have no idea why this is checked/displayed.  Maintaining backward
> compatibility is certainly a nice feature, but supporting
> 1.28 for instance seems completely pointless.  Actually, it
> also means that they use no recent feature, which is sad.
> 
> On the other end of the spectrum, I have no idea why they
> want to check the version this way.  I am not aware of bugs
> in 2.7 for instance, yet I know issues 2.7 solves over 2.6.5,
> which itself is superior to 2.6.2.
> 
> Really, I'd be happy to know more about this.

Well there are other issues also as I have yet to see PHP build cleanly 
on Solaris 10.  Every build of PHP going back a number of revs always
results in "FAILED TEST SUMMARY" at the end of the testsuite as well
as "You may have found a problem in PHP."

My configure line looks like : 

./configure --with-apxs2=/usr/local/bin/apxs --with-mysql=/opt/mysql/mysql \
--with-libxml-dir=/usr/local --sysconfdir=/usr/local/etc \
--includedir=/usr/local/include --libdir=/usr/local/lib \
--libexecdir=/usr/local/libexec --localstatedir=/usr/local/var/php \
--mandir=/usr/share/man --infodir=/usr/local/share \
--cache-file=../php-5.4.10_SunOS5.10_sparcv9.config.cache --disable-debug \
--with-pic --with-bz2 --with-gettext --with-gmp --with-iconv --with-openssl \
--with-zlib --enable-ftp --enable-sockets --without-kerberos \
--enable-calendar --enable-xml --disable-json --with-curl=/usr/local \
--enable-posix

Where apache 2.4.3 is up and running and has been for a while now as well as 
a host of other GNU tools that will not get installed unless they pass their own
testsuite flawlessly.  To get that to happen I did need to contribute back to 
flex
and a few others but the work is worth it. 

What then will it take to get PHP to compile from a release tarball ? 

Shall I create a clean Solaris zone sandbox first and test a build there with 
Oracle Solaris Studio 12.3 ? 

Really I would like to hear from the PHP folks on this as it seems as if PHP is
quite fragile or perhaps simply mysterious. 

Dennis