Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

… 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.