On Wednesday, Luca filed a request to stabilise our new dev-lang/php packages. As of this morning, these are now the standard packages on the PPC64 and x86 architectures.
We’re stabilising PHP-4.3.11 (for the folks who haven’t ported packages to work with PHP 4.4’s reference changes), PHP 4.4.1, and PHP 5.0.5 (for the early adopters who have binary-encrypted packages). PHP 4.4.2 and PHP 5.1.2 will be stabilised sometime in March (is my best guess).
For those who haven’t heard of the dev-lang/php packages, and are still using the older dev-php/php packages, here’s a quick summary of the benefits of the new packages:
There are instructions available on how to migrate from the older PHP packages to our new ones.
My personal thanks to everyone who has made this release possible, including Luca, Wendall, Sebastian, and Andreas.
After six months of hard work by everyone involved, it’s personally very satisfying to see this stuff go stable.
Now we can go on and start to expand the amount of PHP-related packages we include. If you’re the author of a package that PHP developers might be interested in, and you’d like to see it available on Gentoo Linux, please contact the PHP team and let us know of your interest!
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I’ve spent much of this evening looking into the cause of this error:
Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,COERCIBLE) and (utf8_general_ci,IMPLICIT) for operation ‘UNION’
whilst hacking on SugarCRM v4, running with PHP 4.4.1 and MySQL-5.0.17, all running on Gentoo Linux.
The solution I found for tonight was to ensure that the PHP connection to MySQL, and the database being used, are using the same collation.
If you’d like to know more about this problem, please read on. (Blog syndication site readers will find the rest of this article on my blog page).
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We have the first of our new monthly Gentoo web-apps project meetings tomorrow night, at 19:00 UTC in #gentoo-web on irc.freenode.net. I’ve put the agenda up on the wiki.
If there’s anything important that needs adding to the agenda, please let me know before the meeting.
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Unless the spammers have also been enjoying a break from things over the holiday period, the collection of anti-spam additions for b2evolution that I recently put together has been doing a great job. I’ve only had one spammer get through so far - a definite improvement over recent times 
I’ve put together a first release of the antispam patch collection. None of this code is my original work; I’ve just collected these patches from the b2evolution forums and made them available in one, easy-to-apply patch. Full credit for the original authors is included in the README file in the tarball.
Once I’ve caught up with Daniel (who maintains Gentoo’s b2evolution package), I hope to get this patch included as standard on Gentoo. I’d rather resist making this optional; I’m sure everyone using b2evo to run their blog (like all the Gentoo-hosted dev blogs) should have stronger antispam as standard.
I think that there’s still room for improvement. So far, I haven’t seen b2evolution itself do anything with the IP addresses that spam comes from. Blacklisting the IP addresses locally, and submitting them to a central blacklist like bsb.empty.us could be useful. Then, updating the spam recheck, deny access for referer spammers and bad behaviour add-ins to also update the IP blacklists could be very useful The zombie boxes relaying the spam all seem to post a wide range of spam; being able to identify and block them as early as possible may cut down on the spam that does get through.
Now, if only we could actually do something useful about all these zombie boxes that the spam is relayed through …
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