bookmark_borderThey’re taking the Horde to Debian, to Debian!

Now that Horde Groupware 5 has been released as stable software, a lot of users noticed the shortcomings of the PEAR packaging systems. It does not provide an easy and smooth way to upgrade Horde 4 to the latest bugfix version anymore. If you run Horde 4 apps that have not been ported for Horde 5 yet, you need to be very cautious which pear commands you run. A simple pear upgrade -c horde would break your existing installation because it would upgrade everything to the most recent major version. This is not desirable for production systems. Distribution packaging is the solution to this. Receive only compatible upgrades until you decide to do a major upgrade.

Distribution packages of Horde 5 are available for openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from the isv:B1-Systems:Horde5:rolling project.

These packages include development snapshots of unreleased applications like Passwd for Horde 5. They have been modified to fit into the distribution specific standard directories, install regular jobs the distribution way etc. For example, the distribution apps don’t have separate .htaccess files but provide a ready-to-run apache2 vhost config.

Under debian however, nobody stepped up to help the main debian horde packager, Mathieu Parent, to finish the Horde 5 packages in time. This means, the next stable Debian release will probably not include Horde 5.

I have talked to Mathieu and built a patch for the Open Build Service which facilitates PEAR packaging for debian targets.

You can see the progress of debian packaging by adding the Debian repository of the project to your /etc/apt/sources.list file

cd /root/
echo "deb http://widehat.opensuse.org/repositories/isv:/B1-Systems:/Horde5:/rolling/Debian_6.0 ./" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/isv:/B1-Systems:/Horde5:/rolling/Debian_6.0/Release.key
apt-key add Release.key
apt-get update

As of today, the repository only contains php-horde-autoloader but it I aim to fill it with all ~ 100 Horde pear packages (minus the bundles).

If you need business critical, supported Horde 4 or Horde 5 packages for openSUSE/SLES, Redhat/CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu or special architectures like ARM or Itanium, don’t wait for community action but ask for a commercial solution.

bookmark_borderHeads Up: PHP deprecates mysql extension in 5.5.

In a recent developer vote, the php project decided to deprecate the mysql extension in PHP 5.5 and finally remove it from the main PHP project. It may or may not be available for a longer period as a PECL extension.

The mysql extension has long been superseded by two more powerful extensions, PDO/Mysql and mysqli (improved). For years, the older extension has not received any new features and the developers kept it around just to keep compatibility with old code. Framework and application developers are now urged to update their code to use one of the alternative mysql APIs. There are a lot of old code snippets and tutorials around which describe the old API. Eventually, this code will begin to throw warnings and finally stop to work.

Developers discussed the impact of this move on end users. While it might be shocking to see hordes of old installations break just because the hoster updates his PHP version, there is no need to panic. Most hosters have not clenbuterol hydroklorid clen kjope even upgraded to the recent PHP 5.4 release and it might be years to go until PHP 5.6 finally hits enterprise distributions like SLES or RHEL. Additionally, distributors and hosters might opt to provide the PECL version of the mysql extension for backward compatibility. There is enough time left for developers and end users to react on the coming change.

More on the deprecation vote