PHP 5.4 transition

[scott]

Over the next few weeks the PHP 5.4 packages will be developed in the atomic-testing channel. As you may have noticed, ASL transitioned to a 5.4 backend about a year ago, during that time we did not encounter any significant issues however I do recommend that everyone familiarize themselves with the backwards incompatible changes:

http://php.net/manual/en/migration54.incompatible.php

The good news is that Its not a particularly scary list. I expect to have the archive fully transitioned to 5.4, including support packages (pecl, etc) by mid june.

[prupert]

Thank you for the update. This will be interesting for folks that want to move to PHP 5.4. I will certainly give your packages a try on our testing systems. However, it would also be good to know when you expect to drop support for PHP 5.3, which I presume might be the case once PHP 5.4 gets pushed into the Atomic stable channel.

Are you planning to drop support for PHP 5.3 soon (in a couple of months), or will you keep supporting them both via different channels? Knowing that in advance will help those wanting to keep supporting PHP 5.3 to make the appropriate preparations (e.g. moving to another channel for PHP or sticking with Atomic).

[scott]

Assuming the testing goes well, PHP 5.3 will be dropped by mid june (around the 17th). The transition to 5.4 is being sponsored by a customer, and they wanted it in the atomic repo. If a company wanted to sponsor 5.3 certainly we could do that in either another channel, or using the php53 naming convention (which personally, I think is bad) in atomic.

[scott]

First round of packages are now in atomic-testing for EL6

[faris]

Yeah, well, that's bit of a beeper.

We'll have to revert to stock Centos PHP 5.3.x then. 5.4 will break way too many scripts. It is too way early for this.

I dare say reverting will not be simple or smooth

It is a shame that this wasn't happening in 12 months time. Plesk 12.5 is about to come out, complete with multiple-php-version support, and I expect we'll be upgrading (migrating) to 12.x in a year or so.

Anyway, I thought we'd already discussed this and that you'd be supporting 5.3 for as long as possible? It is nice that someone is sponsoring 5.4 but surely that means you'll have extra resources at hand to do that, and that it should not impact 5.3? [he says, hopefully, and putting on his puppy dog face. Or should I use my baby amphibian face?]

Yes, I know, I can't really complain about something that's given to you for free....but I can still whimper about it

[scott]

EL5 packages are going up to atomic-testing now!

[scott]

First round of support packages are complete, while I was going through the process I identified that a few with compatibility problems:

1) suhosin does not natively support php 5.4, but there is one github project I found that does add 5.4 support. It hasnt been maintained for over a year

2) php-eaccelerator, also has github support. But again, looks about a year out of date

Packages that worked just fine:
php-ioncube-loader
php-zend-guard
php-pecl-memcache
php-pecl-memcached
php-pecl-apc

[scott]

FYI, the "Nucleus" repo is nearly complete, it contains the 5.3 branch packages and its support packages. If you are interested in the nucleus repo, please email sales@atomicorp.com.

[Imaging]

Is "Nucleus" publically available yet?

Thanks!

William

[scott]

All of the technical stuff behind the scenes to manage builds, repo management, etc should be complete this week!

[Imaging]

Great, thanks.

[scott]

Side note, I forgot how hard it is to create a repo with this much automation. There are internal staging channels, separate builders, dependency tracking, testing hooks, importers, key signing, etc, etc. I thought it would take a day, its taken almost 2 weeks

[Imaging]

<grin>, sounds like a lot of work.

On a related note, did you decide on the final pricing? And presumably when ready it will be available in the store?

Thanks.

[Imaging]

Any updates about Nucleus and pricing/availiability?

Thanks.