Hi Robert,
I agree with the reordering suggestion. It would also be a useful
place to point end users to. I frequently ask people (in bugs, forums
etc) to clarify what exactly they've got installed.
The second suggestion borders into distribution-specific builds and
doesn't appear to be easy to document clearly.
Chris
PS. Top posters unite!
On 05/02/2010 07:53 AM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
a note i made to myself a while back when first going thru the online
PHP manual, so i thought i'd put it out there and let others ignore it
at their leisure.
i find the order of the two early sections -- "getting started" and
"installation and configuration" -- a bit backwards since that earlier
section assumes that PHP is, somehow, running to some extent as it gives
the reader some samples to test.
as an alternative, it would seem to make more sense to have the
installation chapter first, but start it off with a prelim section along
the lines of, "is PHP already installed and can i skip the rest of this
chapter?" because i'm guessing that numerous linux distros will, if the
web server is installed, also have PHP installed and ready to go. so
before getting into *any* installation, it would save the reader a pile
of time to have a quick checklist of what to look for to verify that PHP
is on the system and behaving properly.
and, to that end, a bit more complicated, but it might be worth
expanding on what might or might not be installed depending on what you
want to use PHP for. for instance, the manual currently talks about PHP
being used for 3 purposes:
* server-side (web) scripting
* command line scripting
* desktop (GUI) applications
but depending on what you want it for, you may not have to install
everything. for instance, if you want only command-line scripting, on
fedora, you need install only the "php-cli" package, and so on. so one
could write a short section explaining that, for which one would have to
verify only that, on linux, you have the "php" utility installed.
if you wanted to go further and do server-side web scripting, then there
are more packages to install and verify. you get the idea.
in any event, it would seem to make more sense to start things off by
just asking the reader to look at his/her current system, run some
commands to see what's there and, if they're lucky, conclude that
they're all set to go and can skip the rest of the install chapter.
thoughts?
rday
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