installin newer package

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Dimple · #1 Post by **Dimple** » 2004-09-12 11:58

Hello people,

I have debian stable running on my server and now I need to have php 4.2 or higher for a application a want to run.
The problem is that 4.1 is in stable and I don't want to upgrade.

Can I install php4.2 with apt-get with some modifications anyway?

Thanks

Jeroen · #2 Post by **Jeroen** » 2004-09-12 12:04

I pondered that a few months ago too for a server running woody, but backports.org (site with backports of generally high-quality) doesn't have it, and trying to backport it myself turned out to be very non-trivial.

You could try, but we decided to not do it, as the chance that something would break was too high for us.

Also note that PHP has had lots of minor backwardds-compatibility breaking changes during the past few years, and that alone could cause existing PHP applications to break.

Dimple · #3 Post by **Dimple** » 2004-09-14 18:41

Is there some place where I can see when satble is planing to update for example php4.1 is to a newer version?

syntaxis · #4 Post by **syntaxis** » 2004-09-15 15:40

No new versions of PHP will enter Stable until the release of Sarge. The Stable release policy is that only critical bug fixes and security updates should make their way into the Stable tree between releases, and those must be backported rather than simply bumping the version number up to whatever release contained the fixes in question. On rare occasions this will turn out to be impractical (e.g. when the arseholes over at OpenBSD refused to disclose the details of an OpenSSH vulnerability, forcing the security team to bump up to the latest OpenSSH release) but that's the general idea.

http://apt-get.org is a good place to look for backports from Unstable, but be careful: backports are unofficial and of unknown quality. In the case of PHP, you might want to try http://www.dotdeb.org - the backports there look pretty well-maintained (though I haven't used them myself) and they even go so far as to provide bug tracking facilities, which most backporters don't bother to do.

startx · #5 Post by **startx** » 2004-09-18 16:27

one of the problems using the backports is that you won't get security updates
which especially for things like php is a good idea to have ...

syntaxis · #6 Post by **syntaxis** » 2004-09-18 16:31

It depends entirely on the backport. http://www.dotdeb.org seems to be pretty prompt in releasing updated PHP packages when security vulnerabilities are found.