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