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. ;)

Thanks to dertobi123, php-5.2.3 has been in Gentoo’s official tree since two days. And since yesterday suhosin-0.9.20 (for both php4 and php5) has been in the tree as well.

For some months I have not started any new projects written in PHP. This is mostly because… once you know about some internals about how things are solved and how (security) problems are dealt with you no longer want to be involved with it. Another big argument is that there are other languages which look much better and are easier to work with in many ways. I for myself found Python to be pretty nice, and so all my new projects are written in Python.

Anyway, recently I have been involved with PHP a bit more again, not because I’m using it for my projects (there is still a big project (HesaSys) which is written in PHP and I will continue to work on it), rather because I am currently helping a bit with PHP related work at Gentoo. This “work” basically is providing a php-5.2.3 ebuild + patchset which sadly isn’t available in the main tree and probably won’t be for some time as CHTEKK, the person who usually does ALL the php work, is very busy with school atm. So, this is why php-5.2.3 is only in the php-experimental overlay and is provided by me (well, the ebuild itself is pretty much a copy of the previous version; the patchset is the part which usually requires a bit of work).

And of course I’m still (proxy-)maintaining xcache, where a new version (1.2.1) was released some days ago (ebuild already done, waiting for “my committer” to commit it to the tree),

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to switch to PHP again. ;)

“eval is evil!”—at least this is what you get told always (and I don’t disagree, btw). So I’m a bit surprised to see something like this

eval("parent::__construct(" . join(',',
    array_map('add_single_quotes', $args)) . ");");

I don’t think there is a (security) problem with this code because of eval() usage, but why use eval() at all if there are better alternatives (call_user_func_array() in this case)?

The ebuilds for them seem to get stabilized right now (just saw the commits from Opfer).

It was a stony way for php though. PHP-5.2 was not deemed ready for the tree as it had so many bugs. The version in the php overlay even used a cvs snapshot because adding all those patches from cvs manually was so hard. I really appreciate CHTEKK’s work (CHTEKK is actually the only maintainer when it comes to php ebuilds itself, as far as I know) very much. Although (or because? :p) it took some time, I think the ebuilds in the tree are very robust know. Suhosin support is available now and everything should have been tested, so I guess there won’t be big breakages. :p

I don’t know why I care about php @ gentoo that much as I did not (and do not want to) start any new projects based on php anymore, because Python is much nicer. :p

Of course I’ll continue to work on the existing big php project.. ;)

Ja… Leute, die sich öfter auf dieser Seite herumtreiben, werden festgestellt haben, dass hier nicht mehr HesaSys mit fb_blog, sondern Typo eingesetzt wird.

Da kommt natürlich die Frage nach dem Grund auf, gerade weil ich ja selbst HesaSys mitentwickel und auch fb_blog von mir stammt: fb_blog kann mir zur Zeit zu wenig. Das Modul soll zwar weiterhin schlank bleiben, aber Sachen wie Pingback oder Trackback sind mir plötzlich doch wichtig. Und mir fehlt einfachd ie Zeit und Lust, fb_blog für HesaSys2 weiterzuentwickeln. Zum einen, weil ich derzeit andere Projekte am Laufen hab und ganz froh bin, mal eine Auszeit von PHP (vor allem PHP4) zu haben, zum anderen, weil HesaSys3 sowieso komplett anders wird und fb_blog da eh nicht mehr laufen wird. Außerdem soll hoffie.info jetzt wirklich primär ein Blog sein und keine Website mit “normalem statischen” Inhalt.

Kurz: Ich habe nicht vor, fb_blog noch weiterzuentwickeln. Eventuell gibts von mir ein neues Blog-Modul für HesaSys3, wir werden sehen…

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Achja, das Design hier wird sich in der nächsten Zeit noch ändern.. das was ihr gerade seht ist nur ein Default-Theme.