Greetings.  We recently moved one of our web servers from an SL 3 system
to an SL 5.1 system (x86_64).  We had to move some "legacy" applications
that were written in PHP and that generate reports in PDF format.

It appears that pdflib (or maybe pdflib "lite") is the tool that's being
used to generate the PDF.

We're trying to make these applications work on the new system, and I
have to say it's a can of worms.

It appears that one has to build PHP from source in order to include the
pdflib capability in PHP.  To do that we had to download a newer version
of m4 that was, for some reason, in the SL 5.1 source directory but not
in the binary distribution.

I'm not happy with much of anything in the previous paragraph, as the
customized packages become maintenance headaches.  Nevertheless, we did
get PHP to build, and it passed all but three of the 3000+ tests.

Now we're having trouble getting Apache to see and use the new version
of PHP.  The "info.php" file keeps finding the canonical SL version of
PHP, unless we delete PHP (rpm -e php), in which case info.php doesn't
find anything.

I suppose that if we remove  some more of the standard SL PHP packages
we might eventually come into equilibrium here, but I keep thinking
there must be a better way

If you've got any cleaner way to deal with PHP/PDF, will you please let
me know ASAP?

Thanks.

					- Mike
-- 
Michael Hannon            mailto:[log in to unmask]
Dept. of Physics          530.752.4966
University of California  530.752.4717 FAX
Davis, CA 95616-8677