Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

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:

• PHP 5 support in Gentoo.
• One package to install CLI, (Fast)CGI and mod_php SAPIs.
• Reduced compile time, using the “fastbuild” USE flag.
• Support for running PHP 4 & PHP 5 on the same box at the same time.
• USE flags for all compile-time PHP options, for maximum flexibility.
• Ability to install PECL extensions for PHP 4 & PHP 5.
• Ready to support PHP 6 alongside PHP 4 and PHP 5 when that is released.

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!