The Gearman project has been slowly migrating from C to C++. This migration has gone under the radar due to the popularity of Cent OS 5 and given gearmand version of 0.14. This version of gearmand worked with any version of pecl/gearman and there was never any compelling reason to upgrade gearmand. That changed with the release of pecl/gearman 1.0

In my last post I explained how to build a development version of a pecl extension.  Now we will go through the bug lifecycle in the pecl/memcache extension.  Besides writing the actual C code to fix the bug, it is considered a best practice to write a test that verifies the bug has been fixed.  I will use PECL bug #16442 - memcache_set fail with integer value as an example, even though it is already been fixed.

My last post I explained how to efficiently checkout the php svn repository.  Now we need to start building pecl extensions and even php itself.  I prefer to use Cent OS for my linux needs and naturally use rpm's to track all my packages.  This means I have a stable version of php installed with all the various extensions that I could want.  Rather than messing with this stable version, I am going to build a custom debug build of php in /usr/local.  I say "debug", because this build of php will use the --enable-debug option to allow easy debugging using gdb.  Since I am doing pecl extension development, I don't want to build the trunk version of php.  I want to build my pecl extensions against the most recent stable version of php to isolate environmental issues as much as possible.

The svn repository for PHP is rather large.  Trying to checkout the entire repo is both time consuming and wastes a lot of space.  Most people, including myself, are only concerned with a subset of the repository.  One of the advantages svn has over git is the ability to do partial checkouts of the repository.  I am going to borrow from an old email Rasmus sent that details how to do a partial checkout of the PHP source code.