llongi's blog

Tomorrow to FOSDEM 07 /me goes, along with hansmi, KillerFox and blubb from the swiss crowd!
Later on both flo and EleRas will join us too, so for me not only will it be "the great Gentoo dev gathering", but also "the great SysCP dev gathering", will all three of us present. As flo correctly guessed, I'll be sporting the black Gentoo t-shirt, which is amazingly comfortable, but flo's SysCP t-shirt intrigues me... Is it possible to have more of those @ flo? In black? /me loves black! We'll be able to discuss that at FOSDEM I suppose...
Now off to bed, as I have to get up early (~4AM) to catch the first train to get to Basel, where the others await, and from there off to Bruxelles. Lugano-Basel-Frankfurt Am Main-Köln-Bruxelles is the exact route, almost 1000 Km, for a total en-route time of about 11 hours, yay!

On the PHP front, I've finally put PHP 5.2.1 and PHP 4.4.5, with all the needed patches and, of course, Suhosin support, into the PHP Overlay. I'll test it all during the next days and hopefully commit to the tree on Monday at the latest. Many bugs are fixed with the latest releases, concurrentmodphp support was greatly improved and fixed (especially wrt 64bit arches), and the new MySQL extension patches are included to have the connection charset configurable per-SAPI, for each PHP version, using php.ini, instead of my.cnf.

Work on VCD is also going steady, we should be near feature-completion soon, so expect some form of pre-release in the next two weeks... Poke Hollow on #gentoo-vserver for more info.

As the title says, I'm late with this blog post, but better late than never!
The new dev-db/libpq and dev-db/postgresql ebuilds reached Portage on Thursday, they seem to work well (we've received positive feedback until now) and already solved a number of bugs! Thanks to dev-zero for all the work spent on them, we make a good team!
Btw, it seems dbs are made to be maintained by two people... Me and dev-zero for PgSQL, me and vivo for MySQL, and it works very well! WEEEE TEAMWORK RULEZ! Thansk guys, it's great to work with you all!

On the PHP front, 5.2.0 reached the overlay, I still have to update the eclasses a little and fix some stuff, as well as update the 4.4.X and 5.1.X releases with some patches, which will probably happen tomorrow, and they'll probably be put into Portage on Sunday or Monday, sorry for the little delay, but at least the stuff's well tested and working then.

Hi all, /me is back, since a few days now, and I've been working on updating stuff...

Today, together with vivo, MySQL 5.0.X stabilization was agreed on, and bug 144999 updated accordingly. x86 already responded and stabled dev-db/mysql-5.0.26-r1, the other arches will soon follow. The upgrade from 4.1.X should be painless, just remember to read the MySQL upgrading guide for instructions on how to backup your data before the upgrade, and be sure to run revdep-rebuild from gentoolkit after the upgrade, as all things linking to MySQL will need to be recompiled.

New PostgreSQL ebuilds are also coming up, those are the first of the new generation of PostgreSQL ebuilds, done together with dev-zero, that will fix up a lot of issues and ease maintainance of PostgreSQL a lot, as well as permitting some exciting new things in the future. ETA for those new ebuilds to enter Portage is this evening (UTC timezone).

PHP 5.2.0 is also finally out, congrats to the PHP Team, expect an ebuild for the final version in the PHP Overlay by Wednesday and in Portage by Saturday at most.

Samhain will also be updated soon to the newest versions, so if you use that, stay tuned.

For all those who wondered, PHP in Gentoo is definitely not dead. ;)

Just put new revisions in the tree (dev-lang/php-4.4.2-r6 and dev-lang/php-5.1.4-r4), that fix various bugs and security issues. On that note, a big thanks to Stefan Esser from Hardened-PHP.net for all his patches and work on securing PHP (and of course the Hardened-PHP patch itself)!
The new PHP revisions also introduce a better separation between eclasses and ebuilds, making their management and the addition of new features easier.

One of these new additions for now is the "concurrentmodphp" USE flag.
It enables building mod_php4 and mod_php5 in a way that both can be loaded at the same time into the same Apache2 instance, each mod_php then has its own mime-types (application/x-httpd-php4{-source} for PHP4 and application/x-httpd-php5{-source} for PHP5) and configuration modifiers (php4_admin_value/php4_admin_flag for PHP4 and php5_admin_value/php5_admin_flag for PHP5 and so on). This feature is highly experimental, I could confirm it working on my x86 system and partially on an x86_64 system, but I'd very much like for users to try it out on systems where breakage is allowed (developement systems or test systems) and report back the results to me, thanks!
To try it, do the following:

emerge --sync
echo dev-lang/php >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
USE="apache2 concurrentmodphp" emerge =php-4* =php-5*

then don't forget to "etc-update" and re-emerge all of your installed PHP modules/extensions (such as dev-php4/pecl-zip). Also all this does not work with the "java-internal" (PHP4) and "sharedext" (PHP4/5) USE flags enabled, so be sure to disable them when you emerge php.

Adieu old-style PHP (dev-php/php et all)...

One of many ways to say that, as I'm posting this, I'm cvs up'ing the affected directories to start the removal of the already masked old-style PHP packages, as announced one month ago.
For all the ones that didn't yet migrate... Well, migrate NOW! :)
And generally, enjoy the fact that "emerge php" will now install dev-lang/php, and you won't have to specify the category anymore.

The title says it all, the old PHP packages were finally masked!
Sorry for the three days delay (22 Apr instead of 19 Apr), but in the end, it's all done.
Again, thanks a lot to all the people involved in this, without their work this would have never been possible.

I've just committed some updates to dev-lang/php, two of which may interest you:

1) the "nls" USE flag, which previously enabled the gettext extension, the mbstring extension and the sqlite-utf8 support, now only enables the gettext extension.
The mbstring extension and sqlite-utf8 support were moved to the "unicode" USE flag. Affected ebuilds are already up to date.

2) the EXTRA_ECONF variable was added to dev-lang/php, that way you can easily pass your own configure parameters to the ebuild if you want to try out some crazy stuff, just do:

EXTRA_ECONF="--with-whatever-I-want" emerge dev-lang/php

Two little notes: the variable doesn't get saved between emerges, so you have to add it to the command line every time, and anything you do that way is totally unsupported, so don't ever file bugs about it, thanks.

UPDATE: it was now changed to EXTRA_ECONF instead of MY_CONF, to follow what a lot of other ebuilds already do.

Your friendly service announcement:

The PHP Herd announces that the old-style PHP packages, which were unsupported and deprecated for months, are finally going away.
After months of work, the team considers the new dev-lang/php package and the related dev-php[4,5]/ categories fully ready for production use, and encourage all users to upgrade.
Helpful informations can be found at the PHP project's pages, along with a HOWTO regarding the migration to dev-lang/php.
The old-style PHP packages (dev-php/php, dev-php/php-cgi, dev-php/mod_php, dev-php/PECL-*, and older dev-php/PEAR-* packages) will be package.masked on Wednesday, 19 April 2006, and removed from the Portage tree about a month later.

As the title says, PHP 4.4.2 and PHP 5.1.2 were just added to Portage, enjoy!
During the last week dev-php/PEAR-PEAR was also updated to 1.4.8 which should hopefully fix all the problems you may have been experiencing with access violations etc. when installing some PEAR packages.
You can also find PHP 5.1.3RC1 in the PHP Overlay now for testing, enjoy that too.

PHP is still going strong, you now can find PHP 5.1.2 and PHP 4.4.2 in the PHP Overlay, and the eclasses/ebuilds have seen a lot of work, they are now simpler to use and all that, and all PHP patches were moved to tarballs (which will allow you to save some bandwidth on emerge --sync's ;) ).
Work has also started to solve bug 120088, we've got an idea and finally the time to try it out, it should work and satisfy all parties involved, but will require some good planning when the changes are introduced, more details on this as soon as I have working code to show people (just follow the Overlay's progress, should appear there in the experimental/ branch as soon as ready).