PHP-5 seems to be screwed on FC-5

[Casimiro de Almeida Barreto]

Hello,

Yesterday I updated one of my servers to FC-5. The primary effect sensed 
was that PHP-5 seems to be broken. Oh... yeah... it works up to a 
certain point but, after that, it miserably fails.

For instance, I have a ridiculous program that count hits. It stopped 
working. Not only a single f_ck_g error message or warning in the 
logs... I have an schedule program that works with MySQL and now it is 
simply unable to deal with ISO-8859-1 encoding... Oh... by the way... 
also refuses to work properly in UTF-8 (not that suported by MySQL 
itself) and other oddities... But as ALL UNIVERSE speaks English, why to 
bother with those who don't...

In both cases I have very little evidence of what is going on (really 
very little)... For instance... $_SEVER['ALL_HTTP'] (quite standard in 
PHP-5) issues error messages and little nasty things like that.

[root at sol httpd]# cat error_log
(...)
PHP Warning:  PHP Startup: ,L\x8c: Unable to initialize module\nModule 
compiled with module API=20041030, debug=0, thread-safety=0\nPHP    
compiled with module API=20050922, debug=0, thread-safety=0\nThese 
options need to match\n in Unknown on line 0
[Fri Mar 24 13:24:39 2006] [notice] mod_python: Creating 4 session 
mutexes based on 256 max processes and 0 max threads.
[Fri Mar 24 13:24:40 2006] [notice] Apache/2.2.0 (Fedora) configured -- 
resuming normal operations
[Fri Mar 24 13:41:07 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.1] PHP Notice:  
Undefined index:  ALL_HTTP in 
/var/www/html/.../streaming/src/core/web_server/SLISAPI.php on line 40
(...)

Since pre-compiled versions of PHP are not to be found on Zend (I guess 
they got tired of things workin in one hour and not workin the next), I 
think it is a good thing that Fedora developers take care about what was 
working and will stop to work on next release... Including explicit 
mechanisms for downgrading...

Besides, I fixed the problems with device drivers (USB and SOUND) on 
FC5. Just rebuilding all the kernel (about a 2 hour work)... after all, 
ASUS being so minor motherboard manufacturer, who in the Universe would 
give a heck if Linux don't work in boxes that use ASUS, Pentium 4 and 
SIS chipsets.

Besides, RAID1 is still crashing. The same with RAID0 and linear. With 
SATA HDDs. Perhaps better thing to do is to spend some thousand US$ 
purchasing an external raid... since it is almost impossible to fix 
something that simply locks the sistem (much like M$) without leaving a 
single trace of what the hell happened.

Regards,

Casimiro

PS: I am not one of those ass-kisses that keeps congratulating for next 
versions... Next versions MUST work all right to deserve congratulation. 
Otherwise it will wind up just like other technological toys that 
enjoyed college students.