(no subject)
i've been trying to reinstall php on my win2k3 box so kirkichi can do some of her uni coursework at home, as the buggers don't allow her access to their development servers outside the campus network (as an aside, i know they won't do this because it'll open up all sorts of security holes, which is fair enough).
i used to run php-4.something.or.other on my older win2k machines, but obviously forgot to add it back to the system when i upgraded everything to win2k3, including my mysql instances.
mysql has installed fine, seems to be running without any problems. the default php setup also appears to be working okay. the issue comes when i try to get phpMyAdmin to run correctly - it fails with the message "Cannot load mysql extension. Please check your PHP configuration."
after making sure that the required modules have been enabled in the config file, restarting the web server process, restarting the damn 2k3 box, etc. and still receiving the same error message, i dispared and decided to read the documentation for PHP-5.2.7. turns out that, by default, php is not built with mysql support, and you cannot enable it through the loadable modules. you have to rebuild the entire thing from source and include the mysql support that way.
fair enough, i'm not adverse to rebuilding something from source to enable the facilites i need.
what i have a problem with is the documentation to rebuild php is sketchy at best, and the links provided to the various required libraries and build tools are hoplessly broken. after a bit of digging around, i've finally managed to locate all the tools and libraries i need, and now have the wonderful struggle of dealing with the msvc command-line environment.
none of the environment variables that i might need (just to use the standard tools - things like the windows scripting host, or even nmake) are set up. even once i've faffed about trying to include these things in the environment and managed to get the damn thing to configure itself correctly, the whole make process dies telling me that cl.exe has returned with code '0x2', which is apparently a fatal error.
i'm getting fed up of this, and am sorely tempted to fire up the other box i've got lying around, to install some flavour of linux as a development machine with apache, php4 and mysql, just so i can get round microsoft's hateful development tools. that is, unless any of you who have decided to read this far have any pointers?