[Soc-coordination] GSOC 2015 weeks 8-10: Co-installable PHP versions

[Murukesh Mohanan]

I have modified the dh-php5 Debhelper addon and the phppear buildsystem to
handle multiple PHP versions. As a first step for understanding Debhelper
build systems, I wrote a simplistic buildsystem called phpbuild, which can
be used for PECL extensions which are built directly using phpize (as
mentioned in http://php.net/manual/en/install.pecl.phpize.php).  Currently,
all three function by looking for /usr/bin/phpizeX.Y commands, and then
using separate build directories for any available versions. This involves
running `phpizeX.Y` in the source directory before each action, and running
`phpizeX.Y --clean` after each action. I have tested them out on a couple
of extensions.

As far as I can tell, much of the documentation for Debhelper build systems
and addons is in /usr/share/doc/debhelper/Programming.gz and in the code
itself, with little or no documentation available online (aside from a few
slideshows from Joey Hess, who created Debhelper). Perl seems to be the
language of choice. `dh-python` has a `pybuild` written in Python, using
Python bindings for the Debhelper API, there still has to be a Perl module
for inclusion in Debhelper's build systems. As such, I have chosen to stick
with Perl, even though I am more comfortable in Python.

Now I'll be testing these on the other extensions packaged by the pkg-php
team, untangling the chains of dependencies as I go.
-- 

Murukesh Mohanan,
IIT Bombay,
India
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