Pecl

On August 28th, the PHP group released the first stable version of the new major branch, PHP 5.6.0 : The PHP Development Team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.6.0. This new version comes with new features, some backward incompatible changes and many improvements. The main features of PHP 5.6.0 include: Constant scalar expressions. Variadic functions and argument unpacking using the … operator. Exponentiation using the ** operator. Function and constant importing with the use keyword. phpdbg as an interactive integrated debugger SAPI. php://input is now reusable, and $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA is deprecated. GMP objects now support operator overloading. File uploads larger than 2 gigabytes in size are now accepted. For a full list of new features, you may read the new features chapter of the migration guide. PHP 5.6.0 also introduces changes that affect compatibility: Array keys won’t be overwritten when defining an array as a property of a class via an array literal. json_decode() is more strict in JSON syntax parsing. Stream wrappers now verify peer certificates and host names by default when using SSL/TLS. GMP resources are now objects. Mcrypt functions now require valid keys and IVs. ...

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 “Lenny” has been published on last Valentine’s day. Although most of the Dotdeb packages for the previous release, “Etch”, are compatible with Lenny, it is now time for Dotdeb to have dedicated packages for this new distribution. 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. ...

I often receive emails telling me that Dotdeb is a great tool, but that some useful packages are missing, such as some PECL extensions. I wish I could maintain many and many packages, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for the Dotdeb’s overall quality and for my free time ;) Sorry for that. 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.