Re: [gentoo-dev] News item: Apache "-D PHP5" needs update to "-D PHP"

["Michał Górny" <mgorny@gentoo.org>]

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On Mon, 4 Jan 2016 11:45:37 +0100
Lars Wendler <polynomial-c@gentoo.org> wrote:

> to be honest I was very upset when I first stumbled upon this problem.
> And yes I only found about it when my apache webserver started to
> deliver php source code instead of the real sites.
> Doing such a change without getting in contact with me as apache
> maintainer before the change was done is very... eh... impolite at best.

Well, if this is the common outcome, then I dare say it's very bad,
at least. Gentoo was never the distribution people could seriously
consider stable, and it not uncommon for breakages like this to happen.
But still, it's very bad if an upgrade is going to suddenly cause
webserver to disclose script sources rather than running it.

While of course the sole fact that this can happen is a complete
disastrous design failure, we can't really do much about it or cause
people to stop using such misdesigned software. Nevertheless, I think
it would be reasonable to at least try to reduce the intentional
breakage to bare minimum.

Therefore, I think you should really work on some kind of backwards
compatibility for people using '-D PHP5' that would prevent those kind
of issues at least for some migration period. With big fat warnings for
people who run it.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny
<http://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/>

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