llongi's blog

PHP in Portage is still alive! ;)

5.1.2 and 4.4.2 should soon be ready, I'm getting a couple of vServers ready to test that and make some changes, as I was without a proper dev-machine for ~ 3 weeks now. A big thanks to the Gentoo-VPS project, setting up vServers with the ebuilds in Portage and the HowTos is really easy and works great!

As a sidenote, I added the minutes of this month's PHP herd meeting to the PHP Overlay page as well as the full IRC log, next meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, the 7th of March, 2006, at 19.00 UTC.
I apologize for the delay in getting the minutes up and the new PHP versions out, but lately I was really busy with school, now I'll have a lot more time at my disposal during the next few weeks and I can break and test stuff much easier, thanks to the vServers.

Just fyi: the 'pear' USE flag was deleted from the dev-lang/php packages, this was done because the USE flag was only there to provide a convenient dependency on dev-php/PEAR-PEAR (which still exists and will continue to exist, and btw: PEAR 1.4.6 was added to the tree today!).
Now, this dependency needed to be so that PEAR-PEAR was emerged after dev-lang/php (as it needs dev-lang/php to work), so we used PDEPEND, which is the only depend type that gets emerged after the package specifying it at the moment in Portage. And this caused all sorts of havoc with other ebuilds that depended on both PEAR-PEAR and dev-lang/php, messing up the dependency chain, where it for example tried to emerge dev-lang/php, then the ebuild that needed PEAR-PEAR, and after that PEAR-PEAR, this became especially obvious with the ezComponents ebuilds. So we fixed it by removing the 'pear' USE and PDEPEND from the dev-lang/php ebuilds: now all the dependency chains are generated correctly and as expected, and you can still install pear as usual with an "emerge dev-php/PEAR-PEAR".

The first PHP Herd Meeting will be held tonight, Saturday 21 January 2006, at 19.00 UTC, in the #gentoo-php IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, for more details check the MeetingAgendas.
The meeting is open to all, so if you just want to attend, if you have something to say, just join the channel!

Today, after about 7 months of work, we finally opened the bugs requesting the stabilization of dev-lang/php version 4.3.11-r5, 4.4.1-r3 and 5.0.5-r5, you can follow the progress at the main bug.

PHP 5.1.1 will never go stable, we're working on getting PHP 5.1.2 in the tree as soon as possible and that one will then be (along with PHP 4.4.2) the candidate for stabling after the customary 30 days a package has to remain in the tree before being marked as stable.
PHP 4.4.2 and PHP 5.1.2 are on their way and should be available in Portage in about a week, if you want to try them out, we already have PHP 5.1.2 in our PHP Overlay.

There was also movement on the PEAR front of things: dev-php/PEAR-PEAR was updated to 1.3.6-r4 wich should fix a few bugs and be collision-protect safe. The new dev-php/PEAR-PEAR now directly includes the old dev-php/PEAR-Archive_Tar, dev-php/PEAR-Console_Getopt and dev-php/PEAR-XML_RPC packages, so there's no need to emerge them anymore, in fact you have to uninstall them (emerge -C) to be able to install the new dev-php/PEAR-PEAR-1.3.6-r4, so if Portage complains about blockers and such, just emerge -C the three packages mentioned above.

A couple of bugs were closed today too, concerning pecl-pdo-pgsql compile failures, and some new packages were added recently to the PHP Overlay: odbtp and pecl-odbtp, an alternative to freetds and the PHP mssql extension to access MSSQL databases.

The PHP Herd will also soon hold a meeting, I'll blog about the definitive date once it's decided.
Things are looking good for PHP on Gentoo imo, and I really wanted to thank all the PHP Herd members and all the other people involved in this, especially Stuart, Sebastian, Jakub, Andreask, Wendall911 and Kloeri, for their great help and amazing work and contribution, thanks guys!

Finally, PHP 5.1.1 and the new revisions for the other dev-lang/php versions are in the Portage tree. :)

Those should fix a lot of bugs and problems, especially with Hardened-PHP (updated to latest 0.4.8 release) and GCC4 (bug in the CURL extension that made the compile fail).
With those, we also now use app-admin/php-toolkit instead of app-admin/eselect-php, so you'll be required to migrate to php-toolkit (just unmerge eselect-php and emerge php-toolkit), since eselect-php will soon be removed from the tree.
The PHP Overlay was updated/cleaned accordingly. Enjoy PHP 5.1! ;)

Happy New Year to everyone! :)

This sure was an interesting year for me, with many unexpected turns, but all that definitely went well and were liked on my part! ;)
I hope for another great year with all of you and with Gentoo.
Again, I wish a great 2006 to all of you!

P.S.: I hope to be able to add PHP 5.1.1 to the Portage tree during the next week, just waiting on bug 116975 to be fixed.

A bit of time has elapsed since the last Gentoo+PHP related blog entry, so I'll update you about it's status with this one.
dev-lang/php was updated and works well, 5.1.1 is ready for Portage, indeed we're adding new and updated PECL etc. packages to the Portage tree lately, but we have to wait until bug 115887 is fixed before we can add the new dev-lang/php packages and eclasses themselves to Portage, so I hope this will happen really soon!
After that we'll leave the new-style PHP packages about one week still in ~ARCH, and start stabling them, beginning with x86 (we'll open a bug about that), probably on the first/second of the new year.
I hope you all appreciate the new PHP packages, they work very well here, and if you appreciate the work we're doing on them, here's my Amazon wishlist if anyone's intersted. Merry christmas and a happy new year!

PHP 5.1.0 is finally out!

And no, you won't see this in Portage anytime soon. It has a couple of problems that are being discussed over at the php-dev mailinglist and it seems 5.1.1 will come out soon, we'll wait for 5.1.1 before considering its addition to the Portage tree. For the ones who really want the bleeding-edge, try out the PHP 5.1.0 ebuild we have in our PHP Overlay. But don't complain if it breaks stuff, it's still in testing! ;)

Also, thanks to Stuart, we finally have php-select, the replacement for eselect-php, wich will be part of the php-toolkit package.
The next days will see a massive update of all new-style PHP related packages (dev-php4/* is already done), and new revisions of dev-lang/php to fix a minor security problem and updates to use php-toolkit instead of eselect-php. That's all for now, cu later!

Current status report:

• Create dev-php/php-toolkit (still needs to be done)
• Fixing deps in the Portage tree (still needs to be done for some packages, not in our influence sphere)
• lib64 Patch (still needs checking)
• PaX support patch (workaround of "pic" USE flag implemented)
• Some safe_mode issues (all fixed along with other security bugs)

So in the end, what we still have to do is dev-php/php-toolkit and review the lib64 patch, both things I didn't have time to do yet and will try to do as soon as possible. Last week was marked by many PHP revision bumps on all PHP packages due to a lot of security fixes, and dev-lang/php got its newest addition of version 4.4.1. Also remember, PHP 5.1.0 is coming soon. ;)
At the moment we don't really have a definitive date for stabling the new-style PHP, but if all goes well 2-3 weeks should suffice, I hope. Well that's all for the moment, happy Gentooing!

The PHP Overlay was updated this evening with a lot of new changes, especially all dev-lang/php ebuilds were revbumped to -r2 (for the ones considered "stable" by upstream, not the RC's or beta's/alpha's).
-r2 releases contain various fixes, regarding issues with open_basedir, safe_mode and some problems in the Apache2 SAPI, and will go into Portage tomorrow evening if all goes well, if possible please test it directly from the PHP Overlay and report problems there if you find any before we go into Portage with the new packages.
Those also include a new "oci8-instant-client" USE flag to support dev-db/oracle-instantclient-basic as Oracle provider for the OCI8 extensions, a new "pic" USE flag to enable/disable PIC code build of PHP (we for now solved it this way since PIC has a relatively big impact on PHP's performance, but it should/must be used on certain Hardened-Gentoo configurations, so since the Hardened profile has the "pic" USE flag enabled by default, this seemed like the best solution, that still gives the user choice over what he wants), also the usage of elibtoolize was fixed, wich should eventually help out on Gentoo/ALT systems (uClibc etc.), this should be all, please test! :)

Ah, I also changed the way extensions get enabled by default: now each extension has its own .ini file, that gets inserted into /etc/php/*/ext/, and a symlink gets created at /etc/php/*/ext-active/, and PHP searches there for .ini files, so to enable/disable an extension you just need to create/delete a symlink, there will be a tool to handle this easily in the future.
This change will atm only be available in the PHP Overlay, the -r2 ebuilds that will go into Portage tomorrow won't include it yet, we want some feedback from users on this, do you like it?
Do you think it's a good idea?
Let us know, either here as comment or at php-bugs@gentoo.org, thanks!