Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

We’re three months after our original planned date of the 8th October 2005 for stabilising PHP 5 on Gentoo. Until we do stabilise, the PHP Herd encourages everyone to use the unstable dev-lang/php packages, either from Portage, or the very latest packages from the Gentoo PHP Overlay. The PHP Herd already considers the old-style PHP packages (dev-php/php et al) obsolete - and the sooner we can finally get rid of them the happier we will be.

The good news is that there isn’t much left for us to do, and most of the activities now are with Gentoo’s arch teams. (Only arch teams can mark packages “stable” in Portage).

1. Arch teams to get php-toolkit keyworded for all arches supporting PHP (in progress)
2. PHP Herd to bring last PHP ebuilds from the overlay into Portage (depends on php-toolkit)
3. PHP Herd to file a bug requesting arch teams to stabilise dev-lang/php et al
4. Arch teams to stabilise dev-lang/php et al

… and that’s it

We’ll be asking for four versions of PHP to be stabilised:

• dev-lang/php-4.3.11, because many apps don’t support PHP 4.4’s reference changes yet
• dev-lang/php-4.4.1, because it’s the “best” version of PHP 4 currently available
• dev-lang/php-5.0.5, because it’s the most widely-used version of PHP 5, and
• dev-lang/php-5.1.1, because it’s the “best” version of PHP 5 currently available

I can’t give you a timetable for when this will be done, as it’s not the PHP Herd that does the stabilising - and the arch teams have a lot more to handle than just PHP. Once the stabilising starts, we want to drop the dev-php/php style packages within 3 months (to give users time to migrate servers over to dev-lang/php) at the latest.

The PHP Herd has (to all intents and purposes) already stopped supporting the dev-php/php style packages (we all use dev-lang/php). January 2006 is a great month to start switching to dev-lang/php, if you haven’t done so already!

Happy New Year

I’m not happy with b2evolution’s out-of-the-box anti-spam protection. Too much spam gets through, and I end up wasting time on cleaning it off my site when I could be working on Gentoo instead.

I’ve hardened my local copy of b2evolution with the following hacks and plugins:

• CAPTCHA support on images, from village-idiot.org.
• IP-blacklist filtering, from kwa.
• Mass spam rechecking, originally from Isaac Schleuter (and integrated into b2evo by me)
• Deny access to all pages for referer spammers, also by Isaac Schleuter
• Bad Behaviour support, also from kwa

I have also added a hack to support Technorati tags.

I’ll see how well these additions do over the next few days, and if there’s any interest, I’ll add them to Gentoo’s b2evolution ebuild.

I’ve bumped our package for Coppermine up to version 1.4.3. This version contains security fixes; if you’re running Coppermine, you’re encouraged to upgrade asap.

VYM (View Your Mind) is a nice little mind mapping utility for Linux. I’ve (finally - sorry about that) bumped the ebuild to v1.7.0. Thanks to Boris Gruschke for the updated ebuild and patches

(I confess tho, that I’ll be sticking with Mind Manager for the time being)

I’ve just added another bugfix release of webapp-config to Portage, courtesy of Gunnar Wrobel and Renat Lumpau. This release contains fixes for issues on BSD, and for the upgrade feature.

If you find webapp-config useful, and are enjoying the major performance and reliability improvements from the Python port, please check out Gunnar’s wish list and Renat’s wish list

… for sending me one of the items on my wish list. I’m going to enjoy reading Navaho Indian Myths during the Christmas break.

At Luca’s insistence I’ve put together an Amazon wishlist. Not a very geeky list, I’m afraid, but if you’ve enjoyed our work on bringing PHP 5 to Gentoo this year, anything off the list would be much appreciated.

If any other devs have wishlists, post them on Planet Gentoo too, and you might just get an item from me too

webapp-config 1.50.2 was released last night. It contains fixes for a few bugs that have been reported in the Python port.

As things stand, I plan on unmasking this at the weekend. The sooner we can move away from the older, slower, buggier bash version the better as far as I am concerned.

I’ll be taking the PHP overlay down for a few hours this weekend. svn.gnqs.org is finally moving from the end of my ADSL line to a hosted server, where there’ll finally be enough bandwidth to host it