How to install WSO2 WSF/PHP on SUSE Linux

If you need to install the WSF/PHP extension on a SUSE Linux with GCC 4.1.2 (pretty old) and receive some strange errors with missing libraries (even if you think / see they are there and even if you followed a la lettre the documentation) you may try the following approach:

0 – extract the sources somewhere on the disk (let’s name it WSFPHP for /usr/local/src/wso2-wsf-php-src-2.0.0)
1 -define the WSFC_HOME to the location where the wsf_c will be install (/opt/wso2/wsf_c in our case)
2 – export WSFC_HOME
3 – cd into wsf_c from the WSFPHP
4 – configure –prefix=${WSFC_HOME}
5 – make
6 – make install
7 – cd into main folder WSFPHP
8 – repeat 4-6
9 – copy ${WSFPHP}/scripts folder into ${WSFC_HOME}/scripts
10 – configure the relevant php.ini as in the manual
11 – make sure the include_path in php.ini includes the ${WSFC_HOME}/scripts folder
12 – make sure the open_basedir from php configuration section in http/vhost includes the ${WSFC_HOME} folder
13 – restart/reload apache and test

Why all these steps? As far as I’ve investigated there is a problem with the libtool which tries to be too smart and takes the libraries from various (and wrong) places. But if you install first the wsf_c and compile the WSF/PHP in a second step then these strange behavior does not appears…

The steps are a compilation of information from:
${WSFPHP}/wsf_c/INSTALL
${WSFPHP}/README.INSTALL
http://wso2.org/forum/thread/4854
http://wso2.org/forum/thread/3842