After 24 months of constant development, the Debian Project is proud to present its new stable version 6.0 (code name Squeeze). Debian 6.0 is a free operating system, coming for the first time in two flavours. Alongside Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is introduced with this version as a technology preview.

The website of the Debian project also got a facelift. Please visit it for more information.

As a consequence, you have to take care of the content of your /etc/apt/sources.list file :

• Squeeze is now refered as “stable”
• Lenny is now known as “oldstable”

Therefore, if you want to stick to Lenny, change all the occurrences of “stable” to “oldstable” or “lenny”.

Security Support for Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 to be discontinued on
February 15th

One year after the release of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 alias 'lenny' and
nearly three years after the release of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 alias
'etch' the security support for the old distribution (4.0 alias
'etch') is coming to an end next month.  The Debian project is proud
to be able to support its old distribution for such a long time and
even for one year after a new version has been released.

The Debian project has released Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 alias 'lenny' on
the 14th of February 2009.  Users and Distributors have been given a
one-year timeframe to upgrade their old installations to the current
stable release.  Hence, the security support for the old release of
4.0 is going to end in February 2010 as previously announced.

Previously announced security updates for the old release will continue
to be available on security.debian.org.

Then, Dotdeb will follow the Debian project and all the Etch packages will be moved to http://archives.dotdeb.org/ on Feb. 15th.

It is now time for you to upgrade your last servers from Etch to Lenny…

What’s next?

I’ll have to prepare the Squeeze release (planned on August 2010). The (early) plans ?

• Focus on high quality PHP 5.3 and MySQL 5.1+ packages
• More useful tools for your LAMP platforms : Gearman, Maatkit… MariaDB? Drizzle? Wait & see
• No more mail-realated packages (Qmail, Vpopmail, Courier, Dovecot, Vqadmin)

I’m actually kind of busy at work, but I managed to build and upload the most important packages : PHP5, PHP5 PECL extensions and MySQL 5.1. Additional pieces of software (Google Perftools, for example) will appear in the next few days. Please be patient and don’t hesit to make suggestions.

What (about LAMP) has changed in Lenny?

• Apache 1.3 has been removed, in favour of Apache 2.2. You have to migrate before any other change.
• In addition, libapache-mod-php5 is still present, but it’s a non-sense and a cause of mistake : it depends on the missing apache-common package! You have been warned.
• MySQL 5.0 comes in a satisfying recent release (5.0.51a) and will take profit of official Debian security releases.

What will change in the Lenny branch of Dotdeb?

• PHP5 (5.2, 5.3, …) has now the focus and will be updated frequently, so PHP4 is not maintained anymore. PHP6 will be uploaded when it’s ready.
• Up-to-date MySQL 5.1 packages will be provided as often as needed
• MySQL 5.0 effort has been discontinued in favour the official Debian packages.
• I’m wondering if I will keep maintaining the mail-related packages (Qmail, Vpopmail, Ezmlm, Qmailadmin…). If you really need them, let me know in the comments.

Should I switch to Lenny or should I stick to Etch?

It’s up to you. I will continue maintaining up-to-date packages for Etch in the next few months, so you’ll have time to upgrade your servers. Whatever you choose, you just have to take care of the Dotdeb entries in your sources.list :

• It should refer to stable or lenny if you want to make the switch and take benefits from the brand new Debian distribution :

deb http://your.mirror/ stable all
deb-src http://your.mirror/ stable all

• It should refer to oldstable or etch if you want to stick to the good old Etch and to take your time to upgrade.

deb http://your.mirror/ oldstable all
deb-src http://your.mirror/ oldstable all

(Please chose a mirror near your location on this page)

Conclusion

Thanks for using Dotdeb! This personnal project still aims (and will continue) to provide an efficient and up-to-date LAMP stack to your servers.

Then, this article will show you how to build packages from your favorite PECL extensions in a strict Debian way, using the dh-make-php package.

Imagine we want to package the Fileinfo extension for PHP5…

First, install all the needed packages (libmagic-dev is only needed here to build Fileinfo) :

# apt-get install dh-make-php php5-dev build-essential libmagic-dev

Then, export some needed environment variables, download the package

# export DEBFULLNAME="Guillaume Plessis"
# export DEBEMAIL="gui@php.net"
# pecl download fileinfo
downloading Fileinfo-1.0.4.tgz ...
Starting to download Fileinfo-1.0.4.tgz (5,835 bytes)
.....done: 5,835 bytes
File /tmp/Fileinfo-1.0.4.tgz downloaded

Ok, let’s summon the magical dh-make-pecl command with the appropriate arguments :

# dh-make-pecl --only 5 Fileinfo-1.0.4.tgz
Creating debian source package: php-fileinfo-1.0.4
Upstream is: Ilia Alshanetsky
Guessing Maintainer: Guillaume Plessis

No error message… Great! dh-make-pecl did its job, e.g. unarchived the tarball and created the php-fileinfo-1.0.4/debian/ subdirectory that contains all the packaging stuff.
“–only 5” restricts the building process to PHP5 packages (PHP4 is obsolete!)

Let’s build the package!

# cd php-fileinfo-1.0.4/
# ./debian/rules binary
xsltproc --nonet --novalid debian/changelog.xsl package.xml > debian/Changelog
touch build-stamp
dh_testdir
...
dh_md5sums
dh_builddeb
dpkg-deb: building package `php5-fileinfo' in `../php5-fileinfo_1.0.4-1_i386.deb'.

That’s it! Let’s take a look at the content of the package…

# dpkg -c ../php5-fileinfo_1.0.4-1_i386.deb
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2008-09-20 10:10 ./
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2008-09-20 10:10 ./usr/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2008-09-20 10:10 ./usr/lib/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2008-09-20 10:10 ./usr/lib/php5/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2008-09-20 10:10 ./usr/lib/php5/20060613+lfs/
-rw-r--r-- root/root     10296 2008-09-20 10:10 ./usr/lib/php5/20060613+lfs/fileinfo.so
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2008-09-20 10:10 ./usr/share/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2008-09-20 10:10 ./usr/share/doc/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2008-09-20 10:10 ./usr/share/doc/php5-fileinfo/
-rw-r--r-- root/root       202 2008-09-20 10:09 ./usr/share/doc/php5-fileinfo/README.Debian
-rw-r--r-- root/root        26 2004-02-13 01:06 ./usr/share/doc/php5-fileinfo/CREDITS
-rw-r--r-- root/root      3466 2008-09-20 10:09 ./usr/share/doc/php5-fileinfo/copyright
-rw-r--r-- root/root       159 2008-09-20 10:09 ./usr/share/doc/php5-fileinfo/changelog.Debian.gz
-rw-r--r-- root/root       865 2005-11-24 23:07 ./usr/share/doc/php5-fileinfo/fileinfo.php
-rw-r--r-- root/root       149 2008-09-20 10:10 ./usr/share/doc/php5-fileinfo/changelog.gz

and its metadata :

# dpkg -I ../php5-fileinfo_1.0.4-1_i386.deb
 new debian package, version 2.0.
 size 12740 bytes: control archive= 4848 bytes.
     940 bytes,    31 lines   *  config               #!/bin/sh
     607 bytes,    20 lines      control
     522 bytes,     7 lines      md5sums
    1218 bytes,    58 lines   *  postinst             #!/bin/sh
     206 bytes,     8 lines   *  postrm               #!/bin/sh
    1773 bytes,    63 lines   *  prerm                #!/bin/sh
    8758 bytes,    67 lines      templates
 Package: php5-fileinfo
 Version: 1.0.4-1
 Section: web
 Priority: optional
 Architecture: i386
 Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.6-6), libmagic1, debconf (>= 0.5) | debconf-2.0, php5 | php5-cli
 Installed-Size: 100
 Maintainer: Guillaume Plessis
 Source: php-fileinfo
 Description: Fileinfo module for PHP 5
  libmagic bindings
  .
  This extension allows retrieval of information regarding vast
  majority of file.
  This information may include dimensions, quality, length etc...
  .
  Additionally it can also be used to retrieve the mime type for a
  particular
  file and for text files proper language encoding.
  .

Great job! Now install the package and enjoy…

For more information and specific needs, take a look at “dh-make-pecl” and “man dh-make-pecl“.

Note : this article has been translated to Belorussian.

Volatile is now part of the Debian project and will be activated by default on Debian Lenny. Its goal is to provide up-to-date packages of some specific pieces of software (ClamAV, Spamassassin for example). Please use it instead of Dotdeb for your mail-filtering packages.