SVN Access
If you wish to get the latest PHP source tree, you can obtain it through SVN. You should be warned that the SVN version is a development version, and as such, is often unstable, and may not even compile properly. The advantage of using SVN, though, is that you can get the latest fixes and updates, without having to wait for the official releases.
PHP uses an advanced configuration system that requires you to have the following tools. re2c is only necessary for developers and can be found here. All other utilities can be obtained from the GNU FTP site.
- autoconf: 2.13
- automake: 1.4+
- libtool: 1.4.x+ (except 1.4.2)
- bison: 1.28, 1.35, 1.75, 2.0 or higher
- flex (PHP 5.2 and earlier): 2.5.4 (not higher)
- re2c: 0.13.4+
If you're experiencing problems, see also the section on buildconf failures.
Steps for using PHP from SVN
-
Obtain the latest PHP source from SVN. There is a single php-src
directory that contains all PHP branches and tags. To get PHP from SVN,
use the "svn checkout http://svn.php.net/repository/php/php-src/branches/BRANCH" notation. To checkout the
latest, consider the following SVN commands:
PHP 5.2:svn checkout http://svn.php.net/repository/php/php-src/branches/PHP_5_2 php-src-5.2
PHP 5.3:svn checkout http://svn.php.net/repository/php/php-src/branches/PHP_5_3 php-src-5.3
PHP 6:svn checkout http://svn.php.net/repository/php/php-src/trunk php-src
The branch names can also be used for SVN diff and merge operations. -
Make sure you have autoconf 2.13 or newer, automake 1.4 or newer and libtool
1.4.
Note that certain combinations of autoconf, automake and libtool may not work when used together. See below for details.
Also, certain versions of autoconf may generate warnings ofAC_PROG_CPP called before AC_PROG_CC. These messages can usually be ignored. -
Run
./buildconfto generate the configure script. This may take several moments. - From this point onwards, installation is similar to the installation of one of the official packages with one main difference – you may need bison 1.28 or later and flex 2.5.4 (PHP 5.2 and earlier) or re2c 0.13.4+ or later (PHP 5.3 and later) to compile, because the pre-generated scanner and parser files may not be included in SVN.
There are many other things, such as the XML source code
for the documentation, available via SVN. See
the web-based view of the SVN
server to see what is available. For example, to checkout the
latest english version of the PHP manual:
svn checkout http://svn.php.net/repository/phpdoc/en/trunk ./phpdoc-en
autoconf, automake and libtool information
There seem to be problems with libtool 1.4.2. It is suggested that you use libtool 1.4, along with autoconf 2.13 and automake 1.4. You should also ensure that autoconf, automake and libtool are installed in the same directory. libtool 1.5 will not work.
The following combinations are known to work:
- autoconf 2.13, automake 1.4 and libtool 1.4.3
- autoconf 2.13, automake 1.5 and libtool 1.4.3
- autoconf 2.63, automake 1.11 and libtool 2.2.6 (with many warnings)
If you have multiple versions of autoconf installed on your computer, as is
common for many UNIXes, you can set the PHP_AUTOCONF and PHP_AUTOHEADER
variables when running buildconf to indicate which versions it should use
e.g.:
PHP_AUTOCONF=autoconf213 PHP_AUTOHEADER=autoheader213 ./buildconf
Zend/zend_language_scanner.c: No such file or directory
PHP only supports flex 2.5.4, not later versions as they broke backwards compatibility. Please note that PHP 5.3 and later do not require flex at all.
