freemode.net

apt-get and PHP4    [ Software ]

Debian's a great Linux distro, and has a wonderful package management system, but every now and then something breaks in a completely unexpected way.

I had run the usual 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade' a few days back, and saw a whole bunch o' packages come up.   I ran through the 20 or so that could be installed that way, and then did a 'apt-get dist-upgrade' to resolve the dependencies for the remaining 70 or so.   It wanted to uninstall PHP4, so after pausing for a full 3/4 of a second, I went ahead with the removal, figuring that it was a uninstall-dosomethingelse-reinstall setup.

Nope, not the case.   Turns out that the libc6 upgrade which precipitated the mass-upgrade-of-dependent-packages just doesn't work with the PHP4 version in -testing.   Grrrgh.   There's a bug report filed which basically says "Wait 'til libc6-2.3.1-15 comes out of unstable" as its resolution.

So then I decided to do a 'apt-get source php4 --compile' to grab the deb-src files for php4 and compile a .deb out of it.   May as well compile it myself if the dependencies are borked, eh?   No good, the process bombs out partway through the configuration steps while looking for ndbm libraries.   I have the libs installed, but not the -dev packages, so I do the 'what header is this looking for?' game, try to install some additional packages, but to no avail.   Most of these libraries are aeons old, have been supplanted by more modern db libs, and the -dev and -altdev packages ain't available from my apt sources.   So the PHP4 configure script still whines about headers missing, and I start being mean to the script and ganking lines out to see if it stops complaining.   It's persistent and stubborn though.

At that point, I give up, and decide to do something more fun and interesting like integrate Cyrus into my mail system and set up procmail as the system-wide mail delivery agent.   That's another story.

This morning, I take another look at the PHP4 problem, and peek into the debian/rules file stashed under the extracted source code directory.   Whallah! there's a '--with-ndbm' argument getting passed to ./configure.   So that comes out, I run 'debuild binary' in the php4-4.1.2 directory, and have to add '--with-openssl=/usr/include/openssl' after it complains again.   That at least gets it to compile - it's still crunching away, I'll have to see how that turns out.