hoffies blog

Some news on the Gentoo side: * on August 16th I’ve been finally set up as a Gentoo developer :) * xcache-1.2.1 is now stable on amd64 and x86 (and the first stable version of it in the tree ever)

And of course PHP itself… a lot of security-related fixes were needed again, and that’s what maintaining dev-lang/php is usual about—waiting/searching for security fixes and hoping that new releases don’t introduce any funny regressions like the CWD bug for symlinked .php files aka ‘Typo3 bug’ introduced in 5.2.4…

On a side node, upstream seems to work on improving the tests and the testsuite itself. It’s really nice that really all tests pass on Gentoo, ... at least with USE=”-* cgi cli fastbuild pcre”. But that’s a start. A lot of test fixes were done by upstream and I hacked up some sed call to change some tests to work in sandbox. I’ll be working towards having a usable test suite for PHP on Gentoo again and will try to fix/make other tests fit our environment as well. This is about php-5.2.4_p20070914 btw, which we added because creating a really large patchset for 5.2.4 (final) again was not really wanted.

Also, it’s pretty sad to see that nothing has happened in the Suhosin project for some time now. It was announced that there would be some kind of bug sqashing timeframe and a new release of the suhosin extension soon—up to now I didn’t find a new suhosin extension release. It’s even worse that the patch hasn’t been updated for php-5.2.4 yet and it no longer cleanly applies. I already made several attempts to fix it and it seems to work (applies cleanly, works as expected), but I’d really prefer it if those changes were done by those persons who wrote it.

Ironically now my attempts to fix suhosin for 5.2.4 were linked on their forums (by a user). Unrelated to the forums post, I really hope the suhosin developers are not angry at the Gentoo/php project because of using a modified suhosin patch (but this was done in the past anyway) once they resume their work (maybe they already did, it’s just that you don’t see anything about any progress…).

I also want to thank Hanno for being such a nice, patient and responsive person and of course mentoring me. While we are at thanking people…, I’d like to thank rbu for collecting all those PHP bugs and quickly letting the Gentoo PHP project know. Also I should not forget the PEAR/PECL/eZ* dreamteam: jakub, who works a lot on PHP-related stuff (PEAR, PECL, ...) in our overlay (and of course does a lot of bug wrangling!) and jokey who commits all his stuff to the tree. :P

That’s it for now, I’ll try to blog more frequently in the future. ;)