all kinds of trouble with pdo on debian based distros

[Richard Harding <rharding@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am really looking for some advice here. I'm trying to move to using 
pdo in my php5 applications and running into all kinds of weird 
behavior. I run on debian stable servers with php5 from backports.org. 
PHP5 has been working fine, but the packages don't include pdo. No 
problem, I can install pdo from pecl.

On my live server I installed pdo from pecl and then had all kinds of 
trouble getting pdo_mysql installed. I did eventually find that if I did
pecl install pdo
pecl install --register-only pdo
pecl install pdo_mysql

it all works. Now the troubles begin. Somehow when I fetch the results 
of a row from a table that has a float field the values come back really 
screwy. Instead of getting a 4.0 on one record I get a pdo returned 
value for that field of 6.104e-34.

So I decided to try and setup a vmware image with a fresh install of 
debian to test things out on rather than the server at this point. Now 
the odd thing is that the values come back fine. Instead my trouble is 
that if I include the pdo.so and pdo_mysql.so in my php.ini, using the 
mysql.so seems to cause apache to segfault. In order to load up my 
install of phpmyadmin I have to comment out the loading of the pdo 
modules and restart apache.

Am I missing how I should be doing this? What is the "should work best" 
method of getting pdo support here? I've seen bugs on the pdo_mysql 
install problem, but not the problems once pdo is installed and running.

Any help, pointers, are appreciated. I had thought things were much less 
bleeding edge than I have been experiencing.

Thanks

Rick