Description:
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The fact that PHP.INI is global creates deployment problems and PHP application conflicts.

PHP.INI should be local to each application.

Global configuration files are bad. The PHP developers should have made this file local to every PHP application, so it doesn't create deployment problems and conflicts.

The global PHP.INI file means one thing: no "deploy by simply uploading the PHP files to the server" for you. After you upload the files to the server, most likely you'll have to tweak PHP.INI or your code.

This is 2006 people, there has to be a better way.

Zend should implement 2 things:

- PHP.INI should be local to each PHP application.

I know that this can create security problems, but I'm sure that if they assign a brilliant software designer on this for one month, they'll find a good way to implement it which doesn't create security problems.

For example, there should be a global PHP_RESTRICTIONS.INI where the admin could add restrictions, and the PHP.INI file should be local to all applications

- There should be a way of running code written for different versions of PHP on the same web server, without modifications. This could be solved by using the local PHP.INI - in the PHP.INI directory of my app, I should be able to specify something like:

PHP_Version=4.1.2

and then, the PHP interpreter should run the specified version (so we should have several interpreter versions installed, and one "main" CGI executable or apache module to route to the correct version specified in the local PHP.INI).

More details are available at
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.390453.0

Thank you.