Easy installation
Pat Dubroy was complaining about how difficult it is to install software on a Mac. I thought I’d relate this story: I’m mucking around with XML parsing in PHP. I found a parser that I want to use, and I wrote a quick test class that instantiates it. I ran the class and the interpreter barfed, complaining that the class wasn’t installed.
Since packages have a standard naming format in PHP, I decided to see if I could install the package without having to find any docs on it. I ran:
$ sudo pear install XML_Parser
(PEAR is the PHP package management system)
Was presented with a little gorp on stdout, that contained the magic word “done”. I ran my test class again, and was happy to see that my test class now runs properly.
Installation took exactly 26 keystrokes.
