PHP and I have been fighting for the last three months. And that really hasn't mattered much to me, since I'm a Perl guy and I had very little I was actually using it for. It all started back in August, when some manual changes I made to Apache caused mod_php4 to start segfaulting. Then about a month ago I tried to make peace, but PHP wanted to go nuclear and get rid of my kernel.

The other day I got around to trying again, and worked through the apt dependency issues. I had to enable Force-LoopBreak (from the man page: SUCH A LOOP SHOULD NEVER EXIST AND IS A GRAVE BUG) and ask for e2fslibs, e2fsprogs, initrd-tools and libc6 to upgrade. Then everything was ok. But still mod_php4 segfaulted for me.

And now, finally, today I got PHP to play nice. I found error messages (when the module was installed but not enabled) suggesting that a pair of .so files were missing. I ran apt-get with the --reinstall option to make sure all the appropriate php files were in place, and all of a sudden things started working.

All this to get a piece of forum software working. If only I still wrote forum software.