I'm building pdo_firebird extension with php5 and firebird pdo on ubuntu / debian tutorial on server provisioning.
Tutorial recommends installing a bunch of extensions:
sudo apt-get install php5-dev firebird2.5-dev php-pear devscripts debget
I've checked Building extensions using phpize and other chapters from PHP Internals Book, but found nothing.
Is it safe to remove installed packages? What is a best practice?
apt-get -y remove --purge php5-dev firebird2.5-dev php-pear devscripts debget
apt-get autoremove -y
It is safe to remove *-dev packages after building is done.
But only the *-dev packages, but removing the *-dev packages will also remove any packages automatically installed with the *-dev packages as dependencies.
E. g. libmcrypt-dev also installs libmcrypt4
sudo apt-get -y install libmcrypt-dev
# run your build commands here ...
sudo apt-get -y purge libmcrypt-dev
will result in:
PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20151012/mcrypt.so' - libmcrypt.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0
So you need to ensure your library packages are installed separate:
sudo apt-get -y install libmcrypt-dev libmcrypt4
# run your build commands here ...
sudo apt-get -y purge libmcrypt-dev
One should generally not have any problems while removing packages as they generally follow the trend they are used to while installing them even when compiling from source.
Although removing specific packages only causes trouble when these are dependent on other packages and vice versa to function correctly (it may show this warning too if there exists any such conflict) hence use autoremove that's it.
To avoid these confusions ,later install all packages separately and not what is bundled with them.