bsd.php.mk suggestion

[Vladimir Zorin]

Hi folks!

I'm not sure if it is the right place to post my suggestion, I hope you 
will excuse and redirect me, if it is not.

I have the following suggestion:

It's a common need, especially among internet-hosting providers, to have
several different PHP versions installed on a server. Given the current 
bsd.php.mk, it's not an easy thing to do:

Say, you have one php version successfully installed.

To install another on the same server, you would naturally do something 
like setting
PREFIX=/usr/local/php4 and then running make. PHP itself will be 
compiled and installed,
but if we try to install some php-extensions after that,  it will fail, 
because every php-extension
needs phpize for proper installation, and it tries to find it in the 
LOCALBASE, not in PREFIX directory.

Of course, you could set LOCALBASE=/usr/local/php4 and then run make. 
But this way
php would also install all the dependencies - apache, mysql and the 
like, which we actually already
have installed in the /usr/local, and which we do not need.

As far as I know, lots of people have faced this problem, and the only 
solution I know, is to patch bsd.php.mk, which seems to be quite 
reasonable. It's a minor patch, adding one option WITH_PHP
(the name, naturally, is of no matter) and changing LOCALBASE to 
WITH_PHP in several places in the
bsd.php.mk file.

In my humble opinion it would do lots of good and save lots of efforts 
if this patch could be incorporated into the default bsd.php.mk - people 
who don't need to install several php versions will not be affected
at all, but those who do will only gain.

I tried to get in touch with Alex Dupre, the maintainer of the 
bsd.php.mk, sent him the same text as the above with the patch, but I 
didn't get any response. As far as I know there are several people who 
tried to contact him regarding the same issue but, alas, didn't get any 
response as well.

So I've decided to post it here, hopefully it will help.

Best regards, Vladimir Zorin