Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

Unless anyone reports any showstoppers in the next 24 hours, on Thursday morning I’ll begin the work of merging all PHP Overlay packages marked with the ‘maint’ KEYWORD into the Portage package tree.

The packages will be masked at first. I’m aiming to move them to ~arch by Thursday 8th September, with the PHP 4 and PHP 5.0 packages going stable one month later on the 8th October. The PHP 5.1 packages will go stable no earlier than one month after the release of PHP 5.1.0 by upstream.

One of the most talked about opensource projects of the year is Xen, the hypervisor-based virtual machine technology from the University of Cambridge. I’m very interested in Xen - it’s an interesting technology for with a lot of potential for server and service provisioning - but I’ve been too busy with other things to have a play.

Having gone through Xen-2.0.6 (w/ kernel 2.6.11), Xen-2.0.7 (w/ kernel 2.6.11), Xen-2.0-testing (w/ kernel 2.6.12.5), and Xen-unstable (w/ kernel 2.6.12.5), my experience is that “vanilla” Xen still has a few problems to iron out.

Of the four that I tried, Xen-2.0.6, Xen-2.0.7 and Xen-2.0-testing all compiled without any hitch - but none of them would boot. They all paniced during the kernel’s boot process, and then promptly rebooted before I could read the screen or capture the details. It took a bit of time to figure out how to capture the crashes. Thanks to VMware Workstation, I now have AVI videos of the boot sequence, showing the panics.

Xen-unstable (the code that will become Xen 3.0) doesn’t build. The xenbus driver relies on a header file which doesn’t exist within the kernel tree - xenstored.h. It’s included in the tools directory of the xen utilities; for now I just put a copy into drivers/xen/xenbus and rebuilt the kernel. There’s a patch posted on the xen-devel mailing list for anyone who uses mkbuildtree.

The good news is that xen-unstable does boot. The machine’s console doesn’t work; I have to ssh into the machine to use it. This evening’s task is to try and get an unprivileged domain up and running.

But first I need to recompile glibc; mine was built with USE=nptlonly, which slows Xen down.

I’ve updated my tarball to match revision 82 of our subversion repository. Apart from fixing all the bugs that have been reported to us, notable changes include:

• fastbuild USE flag, which is reported to reduce compile times by 40% plus
• automatic install of the PHP eselect modules, which are used to automatically create the /usr/bin/php (et al) symlinks by popular demand
• latest app-doc/php-docs package, with a manual that was up to date this morning
• PDO support for PHP 5, as promised
• even more pecl extensions, including dev-php4/pecl-* packages for features shipped with PHP 5

I just have the config files for Apache 1 to fix, and then I think we’re ready to add some of the packages to the Portage tree. We won’t be adding every package; some will continue to be available only in the overlay.

As always, a big thanks to CHTEKK and Wendall911 for their testing, patches, and general hard work on both the overlay and in #gentoo-apache. If everything goes according to plan, hopefully you’ll be able to read their blogs on Planet Gentoo before too long too

Hanno, for SHA256 and Whirlpool support in PHP, see the PHP Manual. You can find the equivalent support for Python on Sourceforge.

A big “thank you” to Daniel, George, Tim and Rob for putting together a stand (and, in Tim’s case, a new talk on Gentoo) with just two weeks’ notice. Although it was a small conference, it’s the first time (that we know of) that Gentoo was represented in the UK outside of our own annual event. Speaking of which …

We liked the venue used by the AFFS for their conference. It’s two stops from Kings Cross on the tube, just a couple of minutes walk from Holloway Road tube station, and it has a pub which serves cheap pints and affordable bar meals right next door. What more could we want?

Reuben was the first to suggest that we should hold two Gentoo UK conferences each year, one in the north and one in the south of the UK. If we can convince its owners to install wireless internet access in time, we’re very interested in holding a Gentoo UK 2006 conference at The Resource Centre in London.

The two things I always enjoy about visiting London are vegetarian sushi and Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road. I was amazed to find that the other guys had never even heard of Foyles (how many bookshops do you know which keep pirhana fish in the Children’s section? :-), so of course I was compelled to drag them along

I went there looking for a book on Exim. (I’ve used Sendmail for the last eleven years, and figured it was time to see what another MTA can offer). Sure enough, Foyles didn’t disappoint, and I was able to pick up a copy of the official book for Exim 4. Now all I need are a few quiet hours to learn Exim and switch over to it. I guess I’m going to end up paying the horrendous wireless access fees in Starbucks after all - the hour I spend in there before work every morning is about the only quiet time I get these days.

http://www.affs.org.uk

Plasmaroo, dsd, tigger, myself and cokehabit will be manning the Gentoo stand @ this year’s affs.org.uk conference in London. Plasmaroo will be giving an ‘Introduction to Gentoo’ talk at 2pm in the afternoon. The conference is tomorrow (Saturday 13th August), which means I have a 5:30am start if I’m going to make it there on time There’s no Internet access @ the venue (alas), and I’ve no plans to video this conference.

Debian UK will be there too, although I’ve no idea who will be there for them and what they’ll have on their stand. Should make for an interesting day.

I’ve added a patch for PHP 4 in the PHP overlay which allows you to build the CLI, CGI and apache/apache2handler SAPIs in a single compilation. If you update your overlay, you can use the ‘fastbuild’ USE flag test it out.

I’m very interested in feedback on this change. It helps the PHP package maintainers, as brings build times right down, and it should also prove popular for anyone who needs to build two or more SAPIs on a box. If you find any problems, please file a bug.

Now to do the same for PHP5

… although, from the bugs turning up in Gentoo’s bugzilla, it seems that a large number of our users still aren’t aware that they can find the latest support for PHP 5 in the Gentoo PHP Overlay

Plenty more bug fixing going on today. We’ve also been working on the documentation. There are now instructions for Installing the overlay from a tarball (based on ScriptBlue’s HOWTO in the forums), instructions for installing from our Subversion repository, (thanks to andreask2 for writing those docs), and we’ve started work on documenting how to turn each PHP extension on and off on Gentoo. There are a lot of extensions to document, so please be patient whilst we get through them all. If you can’t be patient, come and help us get the docs done

I’ve started looking at how we can reduce the amount of time it takes to compile dev-lang/php with all three supported SAPIs enabled (cli, cgi, and one of apache or apache2handler). It looks like the PHP build system can be modified to build multiple SAPIs in a single pass. However, that’ll break our support for each SAPI having a unique php.ini file. Hopefully I’ll know more later this week when I’ve made more progress.

PHP 5.1.0-rc1 is due from upstream any day now (they’ve also started calling their CVS HEAD PHP 6, although that might change to PHP 5.5). We’ll have a package for PHP 5.1.0-rc1 as soon as it’s out. Once the unicode patch has been merged into CVS HEAD, we might add a package for PHP 6 as well (although that’ll be one package that won’t make its way into Portage any time soon

We’ve made some nice improvements to the wiki. Just like the official PHP Manual, you can now leave user comments on the wiki. Over time, we’re hoping that this will prove a good resource for Gentoo users trying to use PHP.

We have a new PHP overlay out, containing a number of bugfixes, and a slight change to the layout of .ini files - all thanks to andreask. .ini files for extensions now go in /etc/php/<sapi>-<php-version>/ext, making them easy to find, edit, or remove as required.

Although we plan on moving the overlay into Portage very soon, we’re not going to stop releasing new versions of the overlay. It’s a much safer place to make change than the Portage tree, and it makes it a lot easier for non-devs to make large contributions without having to become full-blown developers.

My original plan was to use Gentoo’s subversion repository, which at the moment is available only to Gentoo developers. However, with so many high-quality contributions coming from non-devs (I intend to recruit them, but that can’t happen overnight), I’ve decided to host the repository outside of Gentoo’s infrastructure, so that non-devs can actively participate.

You can follow the work on the PHP overlay from this Trac-powered website that I’m hosting. On the site, you’ll find hourly tarballs for download, a wiki containing our slowly-growing documentation, and a bug tracker for you to submit bug reports against the overlay. If you want to help with the documentation, pop into #gentoo-apache, and we’ll fix you up with the necessary permissions on the wiki.

And if anyone wants to skin trac to have a Gentoo look-and-feel to it, please send me through the templates when you’re done

CHTEKK found a patch in upstream’s CVS tree for the PDO drivers segfaulting, so we now have an overlay where you can choose between the PDO support bundled with PHP, or the PDO drivers available through PECL. I’ve also changed it so that each extension gets its own .ini file now; we no longer patch the main php.ini file. This should make administration easier for anyone who uses the pecl packages, at the cost of a few extra inodes under /etc. It also means that you’ll avoid the nasty segfault which happens if you load a PDO driver before the PDO extension itself.

We’re hoping to add an ebuild for Zend Optimizer tomorrow, as well as automatic creation of /usr/bin/php as a symlink to the files under /usr/lib/php[45].

We think we’re very close to the point where we’ll add these packages into the Portage tree.