On Mon, September 18, 2006 12:08 pm, Howard, Tim wrote: > I am a programmer who is fairly new to PHP, and I had a problem trying > to make changes to existing code. I tried to look up any existing > documentation on your site, and after an extensive search, I finally > found someone who has the same problem. The only problem is that he > said something about applying a snapshot that fixed his problem. I > think I finally found the place on your site where these "snapshots" > are > kept, but I am unable to download the .ZIP file because of security > here > at our facility. The thing is, I'm not even sure whether I'm on the > right page, or whether this will actually fix my problem, or what I'm > supposed to do with this "snapshot" once I get it. You have no > documentation (that I can find) about what a "snapshot" is, or how to > download it, or what to do with it. I think I'm going to have to > submit > a bug report, because I don't know what else to do on your site (even > though I've run across several warnings NOT to submit a bug report if > a > problem has already been reported). Your site is incredibly > frustrating > and difficult to navigate.
First and foremost, you'd have to tell us which issue you are trying to solve, and what links made you think a snapshot would fix it. Without that, we're guessing from a pool of approximiately 60,000 known issues that you might be trying to solve, and we are unlikely to give good advice. You probably followed a link and ended up on this: http://snaps.php.net/ It's true that there's a lot of links to a lot of stuff to download, and not much explanatory text there... This page, however, is a good starting point for what this CVS / snapshot stuff is all about: http://us2.php.net/anoncvs.php This was the second link in a search from the homepage with "snapshot" and "online documentation" in the popup. In brief, to explain a snapshot in layman's terms: Many users compile PHP from source code. Various versions of PHP exist, but they can be widely categorized as: Old unsupported versions. Current Stable/Supported Versions. Snapshots taken at various points in time. CVS current work-in-progress. This is a bit of an over-simplification, but may help you understand "snapshot" better. So PHP "snapshots" are an automated process of taking developer's best guess as to what is currently "sort of stable, mostly" If the reference you cite is "old" then whatever it is that was in the "snapshot" is most likely already in current PHP stable -- So getting the "snapshot" from 60 minutes ago would just be silly. OTOH, if the reference is only a few weeks old, you may indeed be stuck with running bleeding-edge PHP to resolve it, and taking the risks that entails. We could not begin to advise anybody on that without knowing a whole lot more about their overall architecture and stability needs. E.g., An ISP with thousands of customers would almost certainly be ill-advised to run from a snapshot. E.g., A cron job to do one specific task running from a snapshot that resolves one particular issue, installed in a different directory than that running the actual web server or any other command line PHP scripts, makes perfect sense for almost anybody. I think you will find as time goes on that PHP Documentation is second to none, even if you ran into a frustrating dead end in this, your first, particular instance. -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
