Things and stuff

I spent the other night trying to compile PHP5 under Mac OS 10.3 for a couple hours but every time I get to the compilation phase I was getting the same error:
/Users/alice/php-5.1.6/ext/libxml/libxml.c:43:28: libxml/xmlsave.h: No such file or directory

I figured out what I needed to do, but since I couldn’t google for a decent answer I figured I should publish what worked for me.

Basically, the libxml that ships with Panther is older than the version PHP5 is expecting at compilation time. According to the help message for ./configure there’s a --with-libxml-dir flag you can use, but I wasn’t actually able to get that to work. Instead it was easier to upgrade my version of libxml.

Go to http://www.xmlsoft.org/ and get the newest source package of libxml2. Next you need to install it, but since PHP5’s Makefile looks in /usr/include you need to change the default prefix for the libxml2 installation. You can do this using the flag:
./configure --prefix=/usr

This will put the correct C files into /usr/include/libxml2/libxml and you can then build PHP5 with no problems.

I don’t recall having this problem with Tiger, and looking on my iBook it appears the default shipped version of libxml2 is more up to date (although I may have installed a new version before, I don’t think I did at least). There’s probably a way to get libxml2 to install in /usr instead of in /opt, but I haven’t figured that out yet.