PHP 4.4.1 from dotdeb on Debian Sarge

Word of warning, don't! I did an upgrade of my debian box, the very box you're connected to right now. Since I use eAccelerator to speed up my Gallery 2 install I had added the dotdeb sources to my /etc/apt/sources.list. So, it only took a few seconds of apt-get update && apt-get upgrade to leave my box in a world of hurt. I got the new PHP 4.4.1 version, which should have been a good thing considering the recent security issues found in >4.4.1. Well, the result was that both Wordpress and Gallery 2 stopped working entirely. Both applications were working fine before the upgrade, and as far as I can tell the problem must be with the dotdeb version of PHP 4.4.1 and not the actual applications I run. Other people I've talked with, that also run Wordpress and Gallery 2, did not have any problems with upgrading to 4.4.1 at all. The errors I saw was pretty strange though, Wordpress was unable to include any of the files it's supposed to include. This was the case, even if the include_path was set correctly in php.ini and the files it tried to include was also placed where they always has been. Gallery 2 showed a different error alltogether, it compained about not being able to redeclare a previously declared function. The strange thing is that the function is only declared once, so the error made no sense. In fact, none of the errors made any sense at all. I was forced to switch back to the official Debian Sarge sources, and install PHP from there instead. Phew, at least the site is back up again now.

 Added 4th. Nov: Seems like dotdeb isn't to blame after all. Numerous problems has been seen with PHP 4.4.1 and it looks like the actual culprit is a buggy version of PHP.

Posted by Christian Mohn aka h0bbel