XAMPP vs basic Windows

Question

I am installing the Open Source app, Laconica, for microblogging. There are instructions to install it using XAMPP. Now I prefer to do a straight Windows install. In doing so, I have run into some problems related to missing variables, improper DB variable definitions, etc. Now my colleague wants to try using XAMPP. But my question is why would XAMPP resolve my problems? How can a tool which help setting up fix these inherent variable and DB issues? Am I missing something? It seems to me that XAMPP is setting up the app to work in a particular env, whereas the problems I am solving are related to the actual PHP code that was written.

Answer 1

XAMPP will come with all the dependencies that you need to run Laconica in one package. It's possible that you currently have a different version of PHP or the database that Laconica is looking for.

XAMPP dosn't set up apache, PHP, etc. It is apache, PHP, ect.

Without knowing what your errors are, it would be difficult to say what problems XAMPP might resolve, as we don't know what problems you are having now.

Answer 2

For earlier versions of Laconica, we didn't set E_NOTICE for our dev environments -- the default is to have E_NOTICE off for Ubuntu systems. So, people using other environments may see "errors" that we didn't.

This has been corrected in later versions; I think we do pretty well with notice errors enabled now.

You can also put this line in your config.php to turn off notice reporting:

 error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE);

You should almost definitely turn off error notifications to the browser, like so:

 ini_set('display_errors', false);