In this new post to his blog Johannes Schlüter shows you how to easily set up a development environment for the recently moved PHP repositories (to git) using "out of tree" builds to keep versions and configurations separate.

As PHP has moved to git recently everybody who works on the PHP source has to recreate his work environment. When working on PHP I have a few requirements for my working dirs. For one I want to be able to use different branches (like 5.3, 5.4 and master) at the same time and I want to quickly test different PHP configurations, like builds using thread-safety or debug mode on or off.

He includes a set of commands you can use to to clone the new repository and create different working directories for the different kinds of builds that you want to install. He also points out as a shell script on github.