"Be careful what you wish for", my mom said. "you just might get it". Never more true than today..
My first experience with MacOS X (via a Powerbook G4 thingy) was ok. Nice eyecandy, some interesting features on the UI.. but lord have mercy, installing (or trying to install) Apache 2.0 and mod_php for a friend was pure pure torture.
The command line functioned well enough (hey, it's BSD and that doesn't hold any terrors for me), but the slightly strange (to me) directory structure threw me for a loop. (Like: what is Apache2 doing in /Library and /lib both ? do they mean the same thing ? different versions? So which one is the service manager thingy controlling then ? )
After the binary installer for PHP failed (and refused to give any meaningful reason either), I sort of figured that it was going to be a long long installing and fiddle session.So it turned out. Attempts to run the thing as a CGI binary seemed to fail too. Has anyone encountered a problem where the GUI control manager for Apache randomly refuses to start up or shut down? It seemed to happen on a regular basis on this machine.
Oh, well. After a monumental hack-o-rama where I tried lots of different ways to get the whole thing running without resorting to recompiles (and failing), I will rub out Apache and compile everything from scratch tomorrow. What a wasted couple of hours :(
