Companies maintaining production servers often have a desire for stable, long-living Operating System and Software distributions. The idea is that once set up, things should not break and major upgrades should only be needed in long intervals and at points in time which best suit business operation. In the SUSE family of operating systems, openSUSE is the young and adventurous (fast-paced, community driven) branch while the SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE Server and SLE Desktop) crowd is a stable, paid-for building block you can depend your mission critical data on. Enterprise platforms have a certain drawback: To maintain stability, they don’t ship the latest-greatest software packages and they try to stick to a certain set of core options and extensions.

For PHP Software, the Open Buildservice server:php:applications repository is one of the primary sources for up to date versions of software like PHPUnit, phpmyadmin, Horde Groupware or wordpress. While it is acceptable and desirable to have a stable and well-maintained (though old) version of apache or mysql, you don’t want to sit on an aged version of web applications or libraries and frameworks for developers.

Today, this repository switched to build against the new SLE11 SP2 code base. SLE11 comes with two PHP options: The php5-* packages which ship PHP 5.2 and the php53-* packages which ship PHP 5.3
Currently, some packages will not build as they require “php-{something}” which is provided by multiple packages. We are working on resolving this.

The switch was needed because more and more packages rely on a more recent version of PEAR or PHP 5.3 features which simply cannot be provided in Service Pack 1 installations without adding extra repositories like server:php and server:php:extensions (unsupported, recent PHP 5.3 built against SLE11).

Please keep in mind that software from OBS is generally not supported by your SLE license.