Re: [tlug] Running multiple web development environments on one machine

[Dave M G <martin@example.com>]

Jim, Stephen, Godwin,

Thank you for your helpful advice.

I find that I'm a bit caught. On the one hand, Godwin makes sense, and 
the set up configurations suggested by Jim and Stephen look very likely 
to be more complicated than I want to take on. I mean, I'm willing to do 
some work to set things up, but one does have to consider a balance 
between constantly setting things up and actually doing the work the set 
up is intended for - in this case making web sites.
On the other hand, I have already run into troubles with differing 
versions of things. MySQL handles passwords differently between versions 
3.2 and 4.1, and WikiMedia wouldn't work when I tried to mirror it 
between my home and hosting service because of differing versions. And 
there are differences in Unicode support, which seems to come up a lot 
as an issue as sites I make often use Japanese.
More significantly in a way, whenever I look for help on mailing lists 
and whatnot, as helpful as people are, as soon as they catch on to the 
fact that my home environment and my hosting environment might be 
different, they throw their hands up and say "well, first you need to be 
using the same versions. You can't be sure that things will ever work 
right if you have different versions".
I guess I'll have to do some more considerations of the costs and 
benefits of attempting such a set up and see if the rewards do make the 
effort worthwhile.
--
Dave M G