[phpesp-general] Weird refusal to install

[Peter F. <pf...@uc...>]

I'm trying to install phpESP 2.1.2 under RHEL5 with the default Apache 
2.2.3 and PHP 5.1.6. I have had an older version of phpESP (1.8) running 
very successfully elsewhere under Fedora Core 4 for years, so I'll 
eventually want to import all the old data; but the problem right now is 
more baffling: installing the database, which went perfectly on the old 
machine. Procedure was:

  1. detar the installation into the web server document root
  2. check httpd.conf for .php (added AddType; SetOutputFilter not used)
  3. set the ownership of the whole phpESP directory tree to apache
  4. edit a phpESP.ini.php to set db_pass, date_format, and emails
  5. edit mysql_create.sql password to match the db_pass in [4]
  6. execute  mysql -u root -p < mysql_create.sql to set up database
  7. log in with Firefox and change phpESP's root password
  8. try to install, and I get

Installing
[ Install FAILED ]
[ Initial data entering failed ]
[ Version delete FAILED ]
[ Version update FAILED ]

I've obviously missed something, but what?

I set DEBUG to true, but the debug screen confirms all the settings 
correctly but doesn't give anything about the actual error (like the 
error return from the call to set_dbschema, which seems to be what 
triggers the "Install FAILED"). Am I missing some vital component of 
PHP? Like an XML parser for /scripts/db/schema.xml? I'm not a MySQL 
person, so most of the stuff in db_update.inc is opaque to me.

I also checked the mysql_populate.sql file (although installation 
doesn't appear to have gotten that far anyway), and it uses DROP and 
CREATE, which are not enabled for the phpesp db user or database in 
mysql_create.sql.

Incidentally, what is
$ESPCONFIG['adodb_pathto_db'] = "/var/www/phpESP/scripts/db/esp.dbm";
for? This is in the config on the old machine as well, and seems to be 
ignored, because that file path doesn't exist (and can't anyway, because 
apache doesn't have write access to /var/www, and in any event it's 
missing the /html/ from the path; but the old system works fine anyway!)

///Peter