RHEL/CentOS 5.6 beta announced (PHP 5.3, BIND 9.7, etc.)

[breun]

The RHEL 5.6 beta announcement is here: https://www.redhat.com/archives/rhelv5- ... 00000.html

The following list summarizes improvements to this
release:

* System
- bind 9.7 - improved DNSsec support
- PHP 5.3 - support for namespaces
- ebtables - Ethernet layer firewall
- dropwatch - network stack packet analysis
- IPA fonts - Japan JIS X 0213:2004 support
- sssd - offline credential caching

[faris]

PHP 5.3 - support for namespaces

I'm confused. I thought RHEL5/Centos5 came with 5.2.x not 5.3.

Faris.

[breun]

Until until 5.5 RHEL/CentOS comes with PHP 5.1.6. Currently PHP 5.2.14 is in the atomic repository as an upgrade (also for RHEL/CentOS 4). According to this beta announcement 5.6 (not released yet) will come with PHP 5.3.

I believe that Scott was already preparing his own PHP 5.3 release for the atomic repo.

[scott]

I'll probably bring the atomic php 5.3 package into parity with the RHEL one (with some modifications, pcre, etc) once I get my hands on it. I'd expect them to be pretty close to one-another already.

[breun]

SRPM's are here: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/enter ... rce/SRPMS/

Update: Oh wait, that's the RHEL 6 SRPM. Well, should be close too, right?

[scott]

yup, exactly

[dayo]

I'll probably bring the atomic php 5.3 package into parity with the RHEL one (with some modifications, pcre, etc) once I get my hands on it. I'd expect them to be pretty close to one-another already.

I hope RHEL has FPM in.

[scott]

If it doesnt then the atomic one will

[dayo]

Nice!

**EDIT**
Looking at the SRPMs, it looks like its PHP 5.3.2 and not 5.3.3 that will be distributed anyway.

[faris]

I don't want to go off-topic, but why would RedHat make such a significant PHP version change in an incremental (5.5 -> 5.6) OS update? I thought the whole idea of RHEL was stability. PHP 5.3.x is such a huge change compared to PHP 5.1.x that this seems like madness. Scripts will stop working in droves. Or will 5.1.6 somehow automagically not get updated if it is already installed as opposed to a fresh OS install?

I've found enough problems with 5.2 compared to 5.1 even though there are no backwards incompatibilities.

[Highland]

I've never understood the whole "Everything must always be the same" mentality. It makes sense for the kernel and other subsystems but it doesn't make sense for periphery packages that have real frontend use (like PHP, MySQL, etc) and are constantly evolving. This just makes people go elsewhere (like Atomic) to get them. Remember, PHP 5.1 was EOL in Aug 2006 and 5.2 has been EOL for a few months now. So it makes sense to offer 5.3 now and bring the C5 users up to speed in terms of PHP. Most of the popular apps out there (Joomla, Wordpress, etc) fully support 5.3 anyways. Still, this is going to cause issues for admins who do a bulk upgrade.