Fatal error: Call to undefined function xslt_create()

I must have installed PHP with XSLT support a hundred times. I have seen this error reported thousands of times in various newsgroups and message boards. I have seen it only once and that was about five years back. But I am seeing it now.

The annual hard disk crash meant having to install all kinds of software all over again. PHP is one of them. First I chose php-5.10 RC it didn't compile at all with the configuration settings I chose. Since GCC 4 still has many incompatibility I update my compiler (and it's dependencies) to no avail. (Fedora users are really guinea pigs for RHEL)

Rather than waste time on 5.10, I switched to 5.04 that too refused to compile at first but once I discarded the xml-rpc option it compiled fine. In reality it should have choked on the --enable-xslt' '--with-xslt-sablot' because after the restart they do not show up with a call to phpinfo() and a call to xslt_create() now fails with the error reported in the title.

Next I tried downloading and installing Sablotron from the source. That had no effect whatso ever.

In the end, I decided to switch back to 4.4.0 and that works like a charm.