Compiling notes

I had to compile the latest version of php recently. This was a lot smoother on a Solaris 10 box than Solaris 8 but I got there in the end with both.

php had dependencies on a couple of other libraries - libiconv libxml2 - so I had to compile these first. Problem was, the make install would try and overwrite /usr/local.
The fix was to set the prefix when running configure;
./configure --prefix=/export/home/richard/builds/myusrlocal

Then set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH and when compiling php it knows to pick up the new library. Once everything is built, move into place at a suitable time.

And;
./configure --help
gives loads of interesting/useful options