I’ve been running PHP5.3 for some time now on my Mac (trough Macports) and had very little problems with it. Recently I started playing a little with the ncurses support in PHP though and found out that it’s actually not bundled with PHP anymore (why? what harm did it do?).
Anyway, shouldn’t be a big problem. Just run pecl install ncurses. Well, not so much. Pecl decided to refuse to find my ncurses-install and throw this at me:
checking for initscr in -lncursesw... no
configure: error: Wrong ncurses lib version or lib not found
ERROR: `/private/tmp/pear/temp/ncurses/configure --enable-ncursesw=autodetect --with-ncurses' failed
I figured that I just needed to pass the correct path to the library when installing as there is a prompt for wide-char-support and for the path to the ncurses installation. No luck there either. Finally I tested an earlier version of the extension (1.0.0) but again no luck.
I ended up downloading, building and installing the package manually as per the instructions here and that worked smoothly. Just had to expliclity enable the extension in /opt/local/etc/php5/php.ini but that shouldn’t be a problem.
Terminal goodness! 