Suppose you have a PHP extension compiled as ext.so shared library. Let's assume that it depends on sockets extension(which is compiled as sockets.so library file). It means that PHP should load sockets.so before ext.so. Sometimes it doesn't, however. In this case running any PHP script you'd catch a startup error similar to the following:
/usr/lib64/php/modules/event.so: undefined symbol: php_sockets_le_socket in Unknown on line 0
Current version of PHP(at the time of writing 5.5.0 was the latest stable
version) loads extensions from php.ini downwards line by line.
So the order of "extensions" in php.ini specifies the order
of loading of the shared libraries. Most GNU/Linux distributions use the --with-config-file-scan-dir=
configure option, which specifies a directory where PHP looks for additional configuration.
Usually this directory contains a file per extension. These files are loaded in alpha-numeric order.
It means that our ext.ini will be loaded before sockets.ini, as well as ext.so
will be loaded before sockets.so, which is not what we wanted!
People in the PHP Group promised to work on this issue. To fix this issue pro tem just rename the ini files in the config file scan directory. Thus our ext.ini has to be renamed to, z-ext.ini, for instance.
