okay.

we're having fun here trying to get texvc to generate PNG files usable by MediaWiki.

we can get it to run properly from the shell, but it does not generate anything from within MediaWiki.

pulling out and going into a sandbox PHP file shows the problem is that doing system, or exec, or popen to the texvc call produces nothing. we have checked and increased memory size of the PHP process to 128M. directories have, for testing purposes, 777 as their permissions, which will probably be backed down if we can.

PHP is compiled as Apache module, not CGI. safe mode is off.

there's some installation-specific thing going on, because we have access to other servers where the test PHP runs just fine.

suggestions? links?

someone's mentioned proc_open as a way to go. is that just superstition? or is there something special about it with respect to what MediaWiki wants to do?

thanks much,

- Jan