[documentation] need help with PDO requirement

[larry at garfieldtech.com]

adept digital evolution wrote:

> Alll IIII caaannn saaayyyy is,
> 
> Drupal is certainly not for the general public. Not installing Drupal, 
> anyhow. I'm sorry to say this if folks here think that Drupal is really 
> something that even 50% of the general public could get installed on 
> their own web server for their own small business or organization or 
> personal blog or anything. Won't happen.
> 
> :-(
> 
> thanks again, Matt, I'm still hanging in here, by a slim thread but 
> still hanging in. I'll be very sad if I have to dump my own Drupal site 
> and go back to Dreamweaver, but as with many folks I am not financed to 
> hire someone with the sort of knowledge that's required to install & 
> maintain Drupal's back end....
> 
> kazar
> -- 
> Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
> List archives: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/

You're really making it more complicated than it needs to be. :-)

1) On your phpinfo() page, right at the top, it will say what version of 
PHP you're running.  If it's older than PHP 5.2.2, get a new web host. 
Really, your web host is not worth giving money to if they can't keep up 
with PHP versions that are now well over a year old.  Drupal 7 requires 
PHP 5.2, and 5.2.1 in particular had huge memory bugs.

If it's a managed server where the host sets up the software for you, 
and it doesn't include PDO out of the box, get a new web host.  That 
means that they're actively removing PDO from the default configuration 
and not putting it back; Drupal requires a working regex engine, too, 
which can also be disabled but only a moronic web host would do so. :-)

On a VPS they may give you a choice of distributions.  Pick one that has 
a PHP 5.2.x version of PHP out of the box.  Sadly that leaves out RHEL, 
because Red Hat doesn't update their software except every 4 years or so 
and still ships PHP 5.1.6.  (All the jokes people used to make about 
Debian?  They apply to Red Hat these days.)

You probably found old instructions for installing PDO from source, 
which should not be necessary on any modern system.  All the stuff about 
"./configure" you should actively ignore unless you want to make life 
hard on yourself.

Some distros will disable bits of the base install and then offer them 
as extra modules.  On most Debian-based systems, for instance, the base 
PHP does not have PDO when you just run:

apt-get install php

However, you can then just as easily run:

apt-get install php5-pdo php5-pdo-mysql

And you're done.  On CentOS replace "apt-get" with "yum".  The package 
names may be slightly different, so just search your package repository 
for "php" and "pdo".  It should be readily recognizable.

Understand also that you're running an unmanaged VPS by the sound of it. 
  That means, by definition, that you are expected to be your own 
sysadmin for the server.  Installing software on the server is entirely 
your responsibility to get right.  That has nothing to do with Drupal, 
or any other PHP framework.

*Most* PHP frameworks at this point have moved to PDO or are in the 
process of doing so.  Many also require PEAR libraries, which would also 
be your job to install.  Any PHP app requires a properly functioning 
LAMP server underneath it.  You need to either know how to manage one, 
hire someone who does, or get a web host that will do it for you (which 
is most of them).

If you're not up to the task of managing your own server, you shouldn't 
be using an unmanaged VPS.  You should be using a managed VPS or a 
traditional shared host.  There's nothing wrong with that; most people 
are not up to the task of running their own server.  That's why managed 
hosts exist, shared or otherwise.

--Larry Garfield