[csw-users] Why has php been split into a bazillion packages?

[Mark Round]

> If I may make a suggestion,
> you should place a copy of that response under the "View news and
> info" tab for mod_php.

Good point. I posted a message to the users and announce lists, but I
must have missed that one out. I've just updated it now.

> So, you're saying the first thing I should do is 'rmpkg CSWphp'
> and then I can pick and choose among the extensions to suit my
> specific needs?

Yup, that's right. As CSWphp is simply a dummy package containing a
list of dependencies, you can now remove it with no ill-effects. It
will then mean you can remove things you don't need without Solaris
complaining that "CSWphp4libfoo is required by CSWphp" etc.

> Aside from the physcial package size, is there
> any way to discern what effect each extension has on the apache
> module size?  I did notice the huge increase in the apache virtual
> memory footprint after installing php initially.

A simple approach is to look at what libraries those extensions make
use of. For instance :

[mround at builds:mround] # cd
/opt/csw/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20020429/
[mround at builds:no-debug-non-zts-20020429] # ls -l
total 2382
-rw-r--r--    1 root     bin        106076 Dec  5 07:26 bcmath.so
-rw-r--r--    1 root     bin         34544 Dec  5 07:26 calendar.so
-rw-r--r--    1 root     bin         43760 Dec  5 07:26 curl.so
-rw-r--r--    1 root     bin         96420 Dec  5 07:26 domxml.so
-rw-r--r--    1 root     bin        412008 Dec  5 07:27 gd.so
-rw-r--r--    1 root     bin         14252 Dec  5 07:27 gettext.so
-rw-r--r--    1 root     bin         12928 Dec  5 07:27 iconv.so
-rw-r--r--    1 root     bin       1206764 Dec  5 07:27 imap.so
-rw-r--r--    1 root     bin         42108 Dec  5 07:27 ldap.so
-rw-r--r--    1 root     bin         75500 Dec  5 07:27 mcal.so
-rw-r--r--    1 root     bin         52792 Dec  5 07:27 mssql.so
-rw-r--r--    1 root     bin         50580 Dec  5 07:27 mysql.so
-rw-r--r--    1 root     bin         68068 Dec  5 07:27 odbc.so
-rw-r--r--    1 root     bin         62312 Dec  5 07:27 openssl.so
-rw-r--r--    1 root     bin         86616 Dec  5 07:27 pgsql.so
-rw-r--r--    1 root     bin         32156 Dec  5 07:27 zlib.so

The obvious culprit here is the imap extension - this will add around
1.2Mb to the shared memory space used by Apache processes. But that's
not all - if you use ldd on it :

[mround at builds:no-debug-non-zts-20020429] # ldd imap.so
warning: ldd: imap.so: is not executable
        libssl.so.0.9.8 =>       /opt/csw/lib/sparcv8plus/libssl.so.0.9.8
        libcrypto.so.0.9.8 =>    /opt/csw/lib/sparcv8plus/libcrypto.so.0.9.8
        libcrypt_i.so.1 =>       /usr/lib/libcrypt_i.so.1
        libpam.so.1 =>   /usr/lib/libpam.so.1
        libc.so.1 =>     /usr/lib/libc.so.1
        libsocket.so.1 =>        /usr/lib/libsocket.so.1
        libnsl.so.1 =>   /usr/lib/libnsl.so.1
        libdl.so.1 =>    /usr/lib/libdl.so.1
        libgen.so.1 =>   /usr/lib/libgen.so.1
        libcmd.so.1 =>   /usr/lib/libcmd.so.1
        libmp.so.2 =>    /usr/lib/libmp.so.2
        /usr/platform/SUNW,Ultra-5_10/lib/libc_psr.so.1

You can see that it will also pull in OpenSSL libraries, which are not
small either (around 2.3Mb for libcrypto - but then they are used by
other extensions as well). So if you're not making use of any
IMAP/POP3 mail servers through PHP, removing this will help your
footprint.

Libgd.so also pulls in a lot of the image processing libraries (t1lib,
libjpeg, libpng etc. as well as freetype) - so if you're not using any
of the image processing functions (http://php.net/gd), this would be a
good one to remove.

Likewise LDAP/PostgreSQL etc.  - these pull in all sorts of other
libraries. Bottom line is, if you're not using an extension, remove
it. Some of these will be fairly obvious - if, for instance, you don't
have a PostgreSQL database server anywhere that you need to access,
then you're pretty safe to go ahead and remove CSWphp4pgsql.