Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

Well, it’s done. For the first time on Gentoo, PHP 5.0 is offically out of package mask and into ~arch. Assuming the next month goes well, we’ll be marking PHP 5.0.4 stable on 8th October 2005. At the same time, we’ll be marking the “consolidated”-style dev-lang/php-4.4.0 stable too.

Why PHP 5.0.4 and not the recently-released PHP 5.0.5? I haven’t had time to test PHP 5.0.5 at all, and I don’t have a feel yet for how well existing packages work with it. I’m planning to leave PHP 5.0.5 in package mask for the time being; probably until PHP 5.0.4 has been marked stable.

I have to give a huge “thank you” to everyone in the PHP Herd, and all the regulars in #gentoo-apache (devs and users alike) who have worked together to put together and test our new packages.

I recently mentioned that the PHP Overlay would be moving to a new server. Unfortunately, due to other demands on my time, and a hardware problem in the new server, it won’t be possible to do that after all just yet. Soon tho!

Thanks especially to Cardoe and everyone behind gentooexperimental.org, at some point this week (hopefully tomorrow, but no guarantees) I’ll be moving the PHP Overlay from its current home to the new site php.portage-overlays.org.

I’m really grateful that we’ve been able to get portage-overlays.org up and running. I’m personally hoping we can make portage-overlays.org a hub for as many overlays as possible. I’m especially interested in using overlays as a home for packages and ebuilds that are sat in bugzilla with no dev willing (or available) to add them to the official Portage tree. F.ex, I already have a local Xen overlay (built largely from the ebuilds in bugzilla). I don’t have the time to add Xen to Portage, and certainly not to support it, but it doesn’t take much time to setup an overlay, and then oversee access from committed parties. If the experience w/ the PHP overlay is anything to go by, we should attract some excellent people who we can then do our best to recruit

Using a wiki such as trac to go alongside the subversion overlay also allows docs to get written and published (and polished) very quickly, and hopefully will come to provide a good source of material for the GDP to base their guides on. It gives us an opportunity to get more people involved, and to make it easier for them to get involved. And it’s not just from people editing the wiki pages. The AddComment macro for Trac allows any user to add comments to a page. This is how the PHP Manual has operated for years, and I’m a firm believer that it’s one of the key reasons why the PHP Manual is as good as it is today. It keeps feedback and further information about a topic as close to the original material as possible - by putting it on the same page.

All the packages in our overlay’s for-portage/ tree have now been added to Portage. They are all package masked until Thursday, to give us time to find any bugs or problems that don’t show up in the overlay.

I’ve also removed the older PHP5 packages from dev-php. If you’re a user of those packages, you need to switch to the new dev-lang/php package in Portage, or start using our PHP Overlay.

I’ve sent an email about all this to the gentoo-dev mailing list; hopefully it’ll also appear in this week’s Gentoo Weekly News.

To make it a bit easier to track which packages from the PHP Overlay will be in Portage, and which ones will not, I’ve split the overlay into two corresponding directories, called “for-portage” and “experimental” respectively. The next time you update your overlay, you’ll need to adjust your PORTDIR_OVERLAY settings accordingly.


PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/gentoo-php-overlay/for-portage /usr/local/gentoo-php-overlay/experimental"


I’ve also posted a new page on our wiki, detailing our timescales for migration from the older PHP packages to the new ones. The summary is that, for PHP 4, you have until 8th Jan 2006 to migrate; for PHP 5, you should have already migrated, because I’m removing those packages no later than Thursday this week.

The tricky thing about the retirement plans will be support from other arch teams. The PHP Herd will definitely take care of x86 and ppc (maybe amd64 too), but so far sparc is the only other arch that we know has started work on supporting the new packages.

So please, if you use the overlay on one of the other arches, please step forward and volunteer to help your arch team test and keyword the packages!