Howard, Tim wrote:
<snip>
Your site is incredibly frustrating and difficult to navigate.

My site? Hmmm, I always thought it was pretty easy to navigate. I
mean, if you're looking for draft beer equipment, all you have to do is
click on the draft beer equipment link. I don't know how I can make
that easier, but I will give it the old college try.

Mon, September 18, 2006 12:08 pm, Howard, Tim wrote:
I am a programmer who is fairly new to PHP, and I had a problem trying
to make changes to existing code. I tried to look up any existing
documentation on your site, and after an extensive search, I finally
found someone who has the same problem. The only problem is that he
said something about applying a snapshot that fixed his problem. I
think I finally found the place on your site where these "snapshots"
are
kept, but I am unable to download the .ZIP file because of security
here
at our facility. The thing is, I'm not even sure whether I'm on the
right page, or whether this will actually fix my problem, or what I'm
supposed to do with this "snapshot" once I get it. You have no
documentation (that I can find) about what a "snapshot" is, or how to
download it, or what to do with it. I think I'm going to have to
submit
a bug report, because I don't know what else to do on your site (even
though I've run across several warnings NT to submit a bug report if
a
problem has already been reported). Your site is incredibly
frustrating
and difficult to navigate.

First and foremost, you'd have to tell us which issue you are trying
to solve, and what links made you think a snapshot would fix it.

Without that, we're guessing from a pool of approximiately 60,000
known issues that you might be trying to solve, and we are unlikely to
give good advice.

You probably followed a link and ended up on this:
http://snaps.php.net/
It's true that there's a lot of links to a lot of stuff to download,
and not much explanatory text there

This page, however, is a good starting point for what this CVS /
snapshot stuff is all about:
http://us2.php.net/anoncvs.php

This was the second link in a search from the homepage with "snapshot"
and "online documentation" in the popup.

In brief, to explain a snapshot in layman's terms:
Many users compile PHP from source code.
Various versions of PHP exist, but they can be widely categorized as:
unsupported versions.
Current Stable/Supported Versions.
Snapshots taken at various points in time.
CVS current work-in-progress.

This is a bit of an over-simplification, but may help you understand
"snapshot" better.

So PHP "snapshots" are an automated process of taking developer's best
guess as to what is currently "sort of stable, mostly"

If the reference you cite is "old" then whatever it is that was in the
"snapshot" is most likely already in current PHP stable -- So getting
the "snapshot" from 60 minutes ago would just be silly.

TH, if the reference is only a few weeks old, you may indeed be
stuck with running bleeding-edge PHP to resolve it, and taking the
risks that entails.

We could not begin to advise anybody on that without knowing a whole
lot more about their overall architecture and stability needs.
E.g., An ISP with thousands of customers would almost certainly be
ill-advised to run from a snapshot.
E.g., A cron job to do one specific task running from a snapshot that
resolves one particular issue, installed in a different directory than
that running the actual web server or any other command line PHP
scripts, makes perfect sense for almost anybody.

I think you will find as time goes on that PHP Documentation is second
to none, even if you ran into a frustrating dead end in this, your
first, particular instance.

Richard Lynch wrote:
In brief, to explain a snapshot in layman's terms:

that's probably a bad idea.

anyone that doesn't know what a snapshot is, probably shouldn't need to know -
they are most likely working in a package-based environment (either Windows,
or an RPM-based Linux), where it would be more beneficial to explain how they
can upgrade their systems using packages.

If you go down the route of explaining what a "snapshot" is, then you will
find yourself being asked what "gcc" is, and where you can get it

Tim, you are better off asking one of your administrators for help.

Kae

Richard Lynch wrote:
In brief, to explain a snapshot in layman's terms:

that's probably a bad idea.

anyone that doesn't know what a snapshot is, probably shouldn't need to know -
they are most likely working in a package-based environment (either Windows,
or an RPM-based Linux), where it would be more beneficial to explain how they
can upgrade their systems using packages.

If you go down the route of explaining what a "snapshot" is, then you will
find yourself being asked what "gcc" is, and where you can get it

Tim, you are better off asking one of your administrators for help.

Kae