I've found posts relating to a phpize failed problem when trying to run pecl or pear install fileinfo. Having this problem on both Slackware 11 and 12.1, I ended up downloading the tgz file for Fileinfo and ran installpkg on it.

The result was some kind of installation of fileinfo in its own folder on the root of the file system (i.e. /Fileinfo*).

With php, I understand that after adding extensions, it is necessary to add an include extensionname.so in the php.ini.

I am not understanding what I am doing, since there is no fileinfo.so file as a result of the fileinfo installation.

Can anyone enlighten me on this if I have made sense.

Thanks

I think the file you downloaded and tried to install was a gzipped tar file and not actually a Slackware package. Slackware packages do have the extension .tgz but have a specific structure and don't generally install to the root directory.

This will happen if you try to installpkg a file that is not a Slackware package and it will mess your system up. All Slackware packages are .tgz's but not all .tgz's are Slackware packages !

You have a source tarball that you need to extract and install following the instructions on the PHP site here.

I'm afraid I know nothing of Pear/PHP but the instructions seem explanatory.

Just be sure a package is a Slackware package before installing it !

Thank you - I removed the /fileinfo folder made during the installpkg run. Looking at the page you reference in your reply, I tried a couple of things but have for the moment given up as any solution which looked relevant did not seem to fit, e.g. one person suggests untarring the fileinfo tarball and then running ./configure make and make install, but there is no configure in the tarball, there is a config.m4 but I have no idea how to use that to install the fileinfo as a php extension, so for now I shall go on without it - the horde I am installing on a new web server installation does not require that extension, it just recommends it, so I'll see how it goes and perhaps pick up later on what is wrong with the phpize etc.