The horrible mess called PHP

[Jan Rękorajski]

On Sun, 16 Jun 2024, Arkadiusz Miśkiewicz via pld-devel-en wrote:

> On 15/06/2024 22:34, Jan Rękorajski wrote:
> 
> > TL;DR Make PHP packaging sustainable or all versioned php packages will
> > be deleted and replaced by a single php package tracking head.
> 
> I'm using almost all old PHPs, including old 4 one. DON'T delete these.
> 
> (I'm using few pear packages, too)
> 
> > 
> > The current model of packaging PHP runtime is not sustainable. >
> > The dependencies are a complete mess, packages (build)require
> > php-something, but none of the versioned phpXY-something provides
> > this.
> 
> Be more specific and I'll try to fix things related to php packages. Now 
> I have to guess what are you talking about.

$ builder -bi -R php-pear-PEAR.spec
[...]
Install dependencies: php-pcre php-xml
Loading [pndir]th-test...
Loading [pndir]th-test...
Loading [pndir]th-ready...
Loading [pndir]th-ready...
Loading [pndir]th...
Loading [pndir]th...
34536 packages read
Removed 2036 duplicate packages from available set
error: php-pcre: no such package
error: php-xml: no such package

Because spec:

%define php_name php%{?php_suffix}
[...]
BuildRequires: %{php_name}-pcre

Basically you need to set %php_suffix manually. This should be automated
at the spec level. Maybe something akin to what I did for kernel
packages. Or maybe "pick the latest runtime if not overriden" at macro
definition level.

And to make it better, all php runtimes should be parallel-installable,
including devel, excluding /usr/bin/php link.

> > This leads to a lot of manual labor when rebuilding php-pecl
> > packages (run this magical command for managing installed deps
> > and pray it works).
> > 
> > This also leades to even worse mess for PEAR packages. The dependency
> > generator needs /usr/bin/php and it gets a random one,
> 
> Does output that it produces depend on php version? AFAIK any php is ok 
> for it to produce the same output.

I have no idea, never used PHP. The script looks pretty generic, tho.

> > if it gets
> > anything at all.
> 
> But you did disable dependency generator for PEAR
> 
> Author: Jan Rękorajski <baggins at pld-linux.org>
> Date:   Sat Oct 17 10:02:30 2020 +0200
> - disable php pear dependency generators - ver 1.753
> 
> and that causes now that rebuilding pear packages produce new packages 
> that do not provide things that existing packages want.
> 
> If you disabled this to get rid of pear specific deps then all pear 
> packages need to be rebuild.

Hah, good point. I might have disabled it because of dependency problems
seteaming from constant installs/removals of the php runtime.

I'm going to reenable that and test if it still works.

-- 
Jan Rękorajski                    | PLD/Linux
SysAdm | baggins<at>pld-linux.org | http://www.pld-linux.org/