Windows 2003 & PHP - How I do hate thee

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From: Simon Wilcox
Subject: Windows 2003 & PHP - How I do hate thee
Date: 23:57 on 02 Mar 2005
First up - can someone explain to me why every fucking edition of Windows
has to move all the configuration about ?

What is the goddamn point you fuckers - unless it's to make more money for
your trainers ?

I mean, it's not as if your OS is a supermarket and you need to keep
moving your displays around in the vain hope that people won't notice that
you're peddling the same old shit as everyone else. Or maybe it is, but I
digress.

No, today's rant is directly squarely at Windows 2003 (and PHP but more
of that pile of phlemagtic yaks bile later).

Why, oh why, do I have to reboot the whole damn server just to change a
path ? That's right folks, if you change the system environment
path variable and you want your "services" to see the new path then you
have to restart the machine. Very fucking state of the art Bill, you twat.

And how did I discover this little gem ? Because php FUCKING LIES TO YOU !
If a bloke down the pub lied to me as much as php did, I'd probably thump
him. Or at the very least curse at him most strongly, under my breath.
Anyway, the point is this:

You install php. You set up the php.ini and tell it where your extensions
are installed. You uncomment one of the standard extensions. You add the
registry key that tells php where to find it's it's ini file. You add
the php directory to the system path (note that I've not restarted the
server at this point). You start php. All is good, except that you get an
error message saying "unable to load dll c:\php\extensions\php_ldap.dll -
file not found". You think to yourself, "I can find you sill ymachine",
coming over all Eddie Izzard for while, and eventually trying all
combinations of absolute and relative paths that you can think of. Much
googling later you find two very important pieces fo information:

1. You need to restart Windows for the system path to take effect.
2. PHP actually completely ignores th extensions path and looks only in
   the system path. But it's error message includes the path you
   specified.

It's telling me that it can't find a file at point A but it never even
fucking looked there. How fantastically lame is that ?!

4 hours this took. 4 hours when I could have been training the users and
invoicing the job instead of battling with stupid operating systems and
applications that have less right to live on Gods clean earth than a
weasel.

Thank you for your attention. I feel better now. Which is, I believe, the
entire point of this list :-)

S.

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