We have some patches to apply for amd64, we need to transfer the PHP 5.1.1 ebuild into Portage, and then we believe we’ll be ready to look again at stabilising the new dev-lang/php packages. We’ll be looking to stabilise dev-lang/php-4.4.1, dev-lang/php-5.0.5, and dev-lang/php-5.1.1. We haven’t discussed whether or not we should stabilise dev-lang/php-4.3.11-r5. I’ll post an update on that when we’ve decided what to do on that.
I sometimes get asked why we don’t just drop PHP 5.0.5, and jump straight to PHP 5.1.1. The reason is that I’ve been asked by users to support PHP 5.0.5 for as long as possible, as there are production environments out there already using it. Some of the code in these environments doesn’t work with PHP 5.1.1 yet - and some of it can’t be fixed, as it’s encoded using one of the commercial encoders. As long as there are no outstanding security-related bugs, there’s no reason why we can’t support PHP 5.0.5 for now.
However, anyone relying on PHP 5.0.5 on Gentoo needs to be working on their upgrade path to PHP 5.1.x now.
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