PHP5 development environment using older versions

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Nov 10, 2011, at 11:50, Phillip Koebbe wrote:

> Greetings all. This is my first inquiry to this list. I've just been through a somewhat painful experience and was wondering if this is the norm and if so, can anything be done to make it less painful.


> All in all, I spent quite a few hours trying to figure all of this out. I'm wondering if this is basically how it goes with MacPorts and trying to use older versions of things. Is it possible to specify, in the Portfile, a minimum version of dependencies and avoid the installation of the newest versions of things, especially when an acceptable version of a dependency is already installed?
> 
> I apologize if this is an oft-discussed topic. I started by writing a message asking for help on how to accomplish what I needed to do, but after figuring it all out, I changed it to what it is now. In the beginning, I googled around quite a bit looking for information about setting up a PHP development environment but didn't find anything specific to using older versions of supporting libraries. The only things I found discussed PHP proper, not things like php-curl, php-imap, or php-postgresql.


Philip,

Sorry you had trouble. It's not an oft-discussed topic, because most users don't want old versions, they want current versions. This is probably why it hasn't been made easier to install old versions in MacPorts.

The instructions in the wiki for installing an older version of a port are fine for dealing with just a single port. But you're talking about several ports which relate to one another. So that's a more complicated operation, which takes some work on your part, as you discovered.

I have to run but may have more to add in a couple hours.