[gentoo-user] PHP 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5

[gentoo-user] PHP 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5

[Tanstaafl]

Hi all,

I have a VM running in the cloud that has an old web/php app (10+ years 
old, believe it or not), that still runs fine on apache 2.2.25, but I 
pinned php to 5.3 some time ago.

Does anyone see any big potential gotchas (major changes) with php 5.4, 
or even 5.5, if I were to upgrade it?

Thx

Re: [gentoo-user] PHP 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5

[Alan McKinnon]

On 02/01/2014 14:46, Tanstaafl wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have a VM running in the cloud that has an old web/php app (10+ years
> old, believe it or not), that still runs fine on apache 2.2.25, but I
> pinned php to 5.3 some time ago.
> 
> Does anyone see any big potential gotchas (major changes) with php 5.4,
> or even 5.5, if I were to upgrade it?
> 
> Thx
> 
> 
> 

Impossible to say without seeing your php code. Potentially there are
many changes.

You'd be better off doing the heavy lifting yourself first:

1. read all the changelogs
2. run it in a staging vm with php5.5 and see what happens

some folks might be in a position to tell you what happened to them with
such an upgrade, but that's only a partial picture, you'd still have to
deal with what *your* code does

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com

Re: [gentoo-user] PHP 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5

[Tanstaafl]

On 2014-01-02 8:15 AM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 02/01/2014 14:46, Tanstaafl wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I have a VM running in the cloud that has an old web/php app (10+ years
>> old, believe it or not), that still runs fine on apache 2.2.25, but I
>> pinned php to 5.3 some time ago.
>>
>> Does anyone see any big potential gotchas (major changes) with php 5.4,
>> or even 5.5, if I were to upgrade it?

> Impossible to say without seeing your php code. Potentially there are
> many changes.
>
> You'd be better off doing the heavy lifting yourself first:
>
> 1. read all the changelogs
> 2. run it in a staging vm with php5.5 and see what happens

Actually, I was just thinking of doing #2 on the dev server (no dev 
going on, but I had this set up some time ago when we moved the 
production server to linode, so now at least I can test things without 
breaking the production system), and if it breaks, just downgrade back 
to 5.3...

That assumes, of course...

Is php difficult to downgrade after an upgrade?

Thx Alan...

Re: [gentoo-user] PHP 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5

[covici]

You can have more than one 
Tanstaafl <tanstaafl@libertytrek.org> wrote:


> > On 02/01/2014 14:46, Tanstaafl wrote:
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> I have a VM running in the cloud that has an old web/php app (10+ years
> >> old, believe it or not), that still runs fine on apache 2.2.25, but I
> >> pinned php to 5.3 some time ago.
> >>
> >> Does anyone see any big potential gotchas (major changes) with php 5.4,
> >> or even 5.5, if I were to upgrade it?
> 
> > Impossible to say without seeing your php code. Potentially there are
> > many changes.
> >
> > You'd be better off doing the heavy lifting yourself first:
> >
> > 1. read all the changelogs
> > 2. run it in a staging vm with php5.5 and see what happens
> 
> Actually, I was just thinking of doing #2 on the dev server (no dev
> going on, but I had this set up some time ago when we moved the
> production server to linode, so now at least I can test things without
> breaking the production system), and if it breaks, just downgrade back
> to 5.3...
> 
> That assumes, of course...
> 
> Is php difficult to downgrade after an upgrade?
You can have more than one version of php at a time, now.  See the
portage news items for details.  You will need PHP_TARGETS variable to
decide which ones you want to work with.


-- 
Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
How do
you spend it?

         John Covici
         covici@ccs.covici.com

Re: [gentoo-user] PHP 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5

[Alan McKinnon]

On 02/01/2014 15:36, Tanstaafl wrote:
> On 2014-01-02 8:15 AM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 02/01/2014 14:46, Tanstaafl wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I have a VM running in the cloud that has an old web/php app (10+ years
>>> old, believe it or not), that still runs fine on apache 2.2.25, but I
>>> pinned php to 5.3 some time ago.
>>>
>>> Does anyone see any big potential gotchas (major changes) with php 5.4,
>>> or even 5.5, if I were to upgrade it?
> 
>> Impossible to say without seeing your php code. Potentially there are
>> many changes.
>>
>> You'd be better off doing the heavy lifting yourself first:
>>
>> 1. read all the changelogs
>> 2. run it in a staging vm with php5.5 and see what happens
> 
> Actually, I was just thinking of doing #2 on the dev server (no dev
> going on, but I had this set up some time ago when we moved the
> production server to linode, so now at least I can test things without
> breaking the production system), and if it breaks, just downgrade back
> to 5.3...
> 
> That assumes, of course...
> 
> Is php difficult to downgrade after an upgrade?

I don't see why not, all three are in the tree and supported (and it's
not glibc)

It might take a few goes through the emerge && depclean cycle to get it
back to a working state but it should all sort out eventually. And you
can always quickpkg things that get upgraded before doing the emerge.

Even better, use a VM and snapshot it.


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com

Re: [gentoo-user] PHP 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 01/02/2014 07:46 AM, Tanstaafl wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have a VM running in the cloud that has an old web/php app (10+ years
> old, believe it or not), that still runs fine on apache 2.2.25, but I
> pinned php to 5.3 some time ago.
> 
> Does anyone see any big potential gotchas (major changes) with php 5.4,
> or even 5.5, if I were to upgrade it?
> 

If it runs *cleanly* on PHP 5.3, then it will be fine with PHP 5.5.
Enable all warnings with PHP 5.3 and see what it tells you.

A number of things were removed between 5.3 and 5.5, but you will be
warned about them in 5.3.

  * http://us1.php.net/manual/en/migration54.incompatible.php

  * http://us1.php.net/manual/en/migration55.incompatible.php

[gentoo-user] Re: PHP 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5

[James]

Tanstaafl <tanstaafl <at> libertytrek.org> writes:


> I have a VM running in the cloud that has an old web/php app (10+ years 
> old, believe it or not), that still runs fine on apache 2.2.25, but I 
> pinned php to 5.3 some time ago.

googling for "vulnerabilities in php 5.3"
yeilded many interesting links. Here is one:

http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-74/product_id-128/version_id-97802/PHP-PHP-5.3.3.html



> Does anyone see any big potential gotchas (major changes) with php 5.4, 
> or even 5.5, if I were to upgrade it?

Security wise, there are many tools for testing the security of
your web server, hopefully, you are concurrent on your server
testing:

http://projects.webappsec.org/w/page/13246988/Web Application Security
Scanner List

open source list at the bottom....



Google for php-<version>-bugs to see if any related to your
servers.

If what you have done is secure, then it *should* be ok, just
monitor and watch your logs closely for a while.

hth,
James