Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Installation Gotchas

Wherever there is Perl, there are “gotchas” — the invisible traps that nullify your best efforts — and there are a few lurking here.

• If you use DO_HTTPD=1 or NO_HTTPD and don’t use APACHE_SRC, then the Apache build will take place in the first Apache directory found, rather than the one with the highest release number.

• If you are using Apache::Registry scripts (see later), line numbers will be wrongly reported in the error_log file. To get the correct numbers — or at least, an approximation to them, use PERL_MARK_WHERE=1. It is hard to see why anyone would prefer wrong line numbers, but this is part of the richness of the world of Perl.

• If you use backslashes to indicate line breaks in the argument list to Makefile.PL and you are running the tcsh shell, the backslashes will be stripped out, and all the parameters after the first backslash will be ignored.

• If you put the mod_perl directory inside the Apache directory, everything will go horribly wrong.

If you escaped these gotchas, don’t be afraid that you have missed the fun: there are more to come. Building software the first time is a challenge, and one makes the effort to get it right.

Building it again, perhaps months or even years later, usually happens after some other drama, like a dead hard disk or a move to a different machine. At this stage one often has other things to think about, and repeating the build from memory can often be painful. mod_perl offers a civilized way of storing the configuration ...