I just had an occurrence of one of those “something that was right at the time but comes back to bite” situations. Some time ago, probably at the time that Gentoo ebuilds for PHP changed from dev-php to dev-lang, the instructions at the time said that a bunch of USE flags had to be specified for the PHP ebuilds. That set of USE flags caused a problem today for — of all things — PolarBlog, the software that drives Crossed Wires.
It’s a case of “how did this ever work?” The Standard PHP Library was actually turned off in my PHP build, which means that a raft of standard PHP function was never there. It eventually broke PolarBlog.
There was absolutely no information on the web (that I could find) about the error messages that PolarBlog was starting to produce — I guess because no-one has been daft enough to try and run web apps over a PHP with no SPL!
What eventually saved me was phpinfo(), and the wonderful folk out there who have a publically-accessible (and Google-indexable) phpinfo page. Their pages were telling me that the bit of PHP I was looking for was provided by SPL, and a check of the USE flags available for the PHP ebuild showed that I was compiling with -spl.
A rebuild of PHP, a restart of Apache, and we’re back on the air!
Crossed Wires 