PHP developers working on Debian have one more reason to be happy with their choice of linux distributions - as Derick Reathans notes, XDebug has been added as an apt-getable package to the Debian systems.

Since a few days, there is a new package in Debian: php5-xdebug. After a few years of talking licenses, due to the help of Martin Meredith and Francois Marier Xdebug can finally be installed with apt-get.

XDebug is a debugging and profiling tool that adds additional information (more than just the usual "error on line..." sort of thing) to the output of your PHP scripts. It also adds more complex functionality like profiling and code coverage reports run on your applications.

Hasin Hayder has a new post to his blog today about trying to set up the PHP extension for interaction between his scripts and the subversion version control libraries on his Ubuntu linux system.

I was trying to interact with my subversion repositories using PHP yesterday and I knew that PECL has a extension named "SVN" for PHP users. So I tried to install in in my machine by when I tried to install it with the [following] command it always failed.

The trick to his hint is to install the libsvn-dev package (found via a search with apt-get) and installed and compiled in to the PHP installation with the extension. Sample code is included.