[gentoo-dev] News on PHP5 support on Gentoo

[Stuart Herbert]

Hi,

I regularly get requests for news about PHP5 support on Gentoo.  I've
been posting news regularly in my blog [5], but it's clear that many
Gentoo users still aren't aware about what we're doing.  

I hope this email answers some of the common questions.

We're working to provide support for both PHP4 and PHP5 running on the
same box.  At the moment, this work is available in a tarball overlay
[1], along with a number of supporting eselect modules [2],[3],[4].  The
overlay contains new dev-lang/php packages, and PHP extensions under
dev-php4/ and dev-php5 categories.

The new dev-lang/php package in the overlay replaces dev-php/php,
dev-php/php-cgi, and dev-php/mod_php.  The overlay uses a single package
to deliver all three SAPIs.  The package is SLOTed, allowing PHP4 and
PHP5 to be installed on the same box at the same time.

The new dev-lang/php package provides two virtuals:

* virtual/php - means that the php CLI SAPI is installed
* virtual/httpd-php - means that php-cgi or mod_php is installed

There are packages in Portage which currently (R)DEPEND on dev-php/php
or dev-php/mod_php.  When this overlay has been added to Portage, we'll
need to fix all of these packages to (R)DEPEND on the virtuals instead.

In the overlay, PHP extensions move from dev-php into dev-php4/ and
dev-php5 categories.  Install packages from dev-php4/ if you want to use
them for PHP4, and from dev-php5/ if you want to use them for PHP5.  The
category names are provisional; we may go with php4-ext and php5-ext
when we add all of this stuff into the Portage tree.

We're part-way through adding all the extensions to the overlay.

The dev-lang/php package installs into /usr/lib/php[45]/, and does not
install the php or php-cgi binaries into /usr/bin.  We've written three
modules for eselect, which you can use to make /usr/bin/php et al
symlink either to PHP4 or PHP5 as you wish.  The symlinks are not needed
by any of the packages in the overlay.

PEAR support is next on the list.  We will make the overlay work with
the existing dev-php/PEAR-* packages in Portage.  dev-php/PEAR-PEAR will
install the 'pear' command; it won't be installed by dev-lang/php (we'll
make dev-lang/php RDEPEND on dev-php/PEAR-PEAR so that pear continues to
be installed by default).

After that, we have a lot of testing to do, some documentation to write,
and we need to decide on the best way to add these packages into Portage
to replace the existing PHP packages.  Nothing has been decided yet, but
it would make sense for the dev-php/php-4* packages and the new
dev-lang/php package to both exist as stable packages for a transitional
period, whilst the masked dev-php/php-5* packages would be dropped in
favour of the dev-lang/php package.

Once the packages are in the Portage tree, it will take a bit of time to
mark them stable.  We hope to have x86 and ppc stable a month or so
after the release of php-5.1.0, but that is an aspiration, not a
commitment.

To keep up to date with the latest news on this work, follow my blog
postings [5].  The best way to provide feedback is to pop into
#gentoo-apache on irc.freenode.org.

PLEASE DO NOT FILE BUGS IN BUGZILLA ABOUT THE PACKAGES IN THE OVERLAY.

[1] http://dev.gentoo.org/~stuart/php/php-overlay.tar.gz
[2] http://dev.gentoo.org/~stuart/php/php.eselect
[3] http://dev.gentoo.org/~stuart/php/php-cgi.eselect
[4] http://dev.gentoo.org/~stuart/php/php-devel.eselect
[5] http://planet.gentoo.org/

Best regards,
Stu
-- 
Stuart Herbert                                         stuart@g.o
Gentoo Developer                                  http://www.gentoo.org/
                                              http://stu.gnqs.org/diary/

GnuGP key id# F9AFC57C available from http://pgp.mit.edu
Key fingerprint = 31FB 50D4 1F88 E227 F319  C549 0C2F 80BA F9AF C57C
--