I beat my head against this one for hours. A recompiled version of PHP 5.1.6 on OS X was simply not loading my php.ini, even though a valid file existed in the place specified by the –with-config-file-path configure setting (/etc), and no other php.ini files existed on the system.
Eventually, after many rebuilds, I downloaded a clean copy of the source, rebuilt from scratch and voila – it worked. however, changing it and recompiling prodiced the broken results again. make distclean and a rebuild made it ork again. So, if you’re seeing this problem, a clean recompile (don’t forget to use config.nice) should make it all work again.
I’m not sure if this is a PHP bug or not – is it meant to work?
Error-free PHP
Not nearly as good as it sounds. I’ve become plagued by a very irritating problem over the last couple of weeks – I’m getting no error output from PHP whatsoever, neither to the browser nor to logs, even though all such options are enabled. My config files are as stock as they can be and still work. It’s just making debugging nearly impossible. I’m getting the same symptoms on OS X and RedHat EL4, so it’s not a platform-dependent thing. They are also on different versions of Apache (2.0.54-12 from Fink and 2.0.52 from RHN). Grrr.
Update
I found it!! Really silly issue and it explains everything. There was a .htaccess file containing an old line:
php_value display_errors true
It appears that (unlike in the rest of PHP) ‘true’ is interpreted as boolean false in this context. Commenting it out or setting it to 1 makes it work.