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.
9 Comments so far
Guillaume Plessis, on November 5, 2005 at 3:08pm, said:
Hello
I'm the maintainer of Dotdeb. I just uploaded new packages that fix these bugs :
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=35067
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=35071
I hope this should solve your problem. Just apt-get upgrade.
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h0bbel, on November 5, 2005 at 11:21pm, said:
Excellent! Nice of you to drop by, I'll have a look at the dotdeb packages again. Most likely in a VMWare session though :-)
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Guillaume Plessis, on November 6, 2005 at 12:20am, said:
What's this crap piece of software? ;)
Use something like Xen, qemu or vserver instead!
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Shadow, on November 6, 2005 at 5:05am, said:
Apache2 and mod_rewrite isn't working with PHP 4.4.1. I've installed the NEW dotdeb packages :-)
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=35059
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h0bbel, on November 6, 2005 at 9:42am, said:
PHP 4.4.1 seems to be one of the buggiest releases to date :(
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Guillaume Plessis, on November 6, 2005 at 12:22pm, said:
Shadow : Ok, I'm planning a new release this week to fix this problem
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Shadow, on November 6, 2005 at 1:04pm, said:
Mysql 5 seems buggy, too. I have problems in phpMyAdmin and some SQL Error's... I hate it :)
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h0bbel, on November 6, 2005 at 5:00pm, said:
And this is the new place to report bugs? Nice ;-)
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bugeats, on April 1, 2006 at 1:45am, said:
dotdeb borked my Debian install too! Avoid it if you can! Even after removing the packages, reinstalling the new ones, my lamp stack is fubar.
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