[Chameleon] dbase problem on Debian GNU/Linux

[Paul Spencer]

Niccolo,

I haven't seen any indication that the regex problem was solved in 4.6. 
  I'm not familiar at all with Debian (gentoo guy), but I seem to 
remember that there are several different packages of MapServer for 
Debian.  As this is basically a packaging problem, I would suggest 
looking for another package that works around this bug.

Regarding dbase, AFAIK, the dbase extension is distributed with the PHP 
source code and is normally compiled into PHP.  I just looked at the 
source and PHP is distributed under a PHP license ... which doesn't look 
to be based on the GPL (more like an MIT-X license in fact).  The dbase 
extension that is included does not have a different license from any 
other part of PHP or its extensions (the few I looked at quickly).  If 
you are getting a php4 package for Debian, then it could include 
compiled-in dbase support without any different license.  Which makes me 
think that this is also a packaging issue.

Not sure if I really helped much :)

Cheers

Paul

Niccolo Rigacci wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I tried to run Chameleon on my GNU/Linux Debian Sarge box. It
> seems that I have two problems.
> 
> The first problem is a non working php4-mapscript, this is a
> known problem originating from the fact that PHP4 on Debian was
> compiled '--with-regex=php' (the php default) instead of
> '--with-regex=system'. We hope that the new upcoming Mapserver
> 4.6.0 will solve the problem.
> 
> The second more serious problem is with dbase support. Once
> installed Chameleon does not see the dbase extension and fails to
> load php_dbase.so.
> 
> I suppose that PHP4 on Debian was not compiled with
> '--enable-dbase' due some non-free license problem. I found a
> php4-dbase Debian package, but it is for the old Woody Debian
> distro and it was a non-free package. For Red Hat I see also that
> dbase support is provided by a separate, non GPL .rpm package
> (http://phprpms.sourceforge.net/).
> 
> Does somebody knows the issues involved? Is Chameleon really
> dependent from a non GPL code? Does anybody have installed it on
> a Debian box?
> 
> Thanks.

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|Paul Spencer                           pspencer at dmsolutions.ca   |
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|Applications & Software Development                              |
|DM Solutions Group Inc                 http://www.dmsolutions.ca/|
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