Remi's RPM repository - Blog

Here is a small comparison of the various solutions to use a Microsoft SQL Server database from PHP, on Linux.

All the tests have be run on Fedora 23 but should work on RHEL or CentOS version 7.

Tested extensions:

• pdo_odbc (see #1, #3)
• mssql (see #2)
• sqlsrv (see #4)
• pdo_sqlsrv (see #5)
• pdo_dblib (see #6)

FESCO have approved, for Fedora 25 the upgrade from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.0.

Version 7.1.0 Alpha 1 is released. It's now enter the stabilisation phase for the developpers, and the test phase for the users.

RPM of this upcoming version of PHP 7.1, are available in remi repository for Fedora 22, 23, 24 and Enterprise Linux 6, 7 (RHEL, CentOS, ...) in a fresh new Software Collection (php71) allowing its installation beside the system version.

Here is some download statistics from remi repository, for the various PHP versions available.

Back from Forum PHP Paris 2015.

First, a huge thanks to AFUP for the organization of this great event, as always, reception was beyond reproach.

This event was, once more, a great opportunity for many and rewarding meetings with lot of  PHP developers and users.

This year was exceptional, because PHP is 20 years old, AFUP is 15 years old and of course because of upcoming  PHP version 7:

On the photo : (top) Derick Rethans, Anatol Belski, me, Zeev Suraski, (bottom) Pierre Joye, Rasmus Lerdorf, Bob Weinand and Nikita Popov.

More photos on Flickr.

I had the change to give a talk about collaboration between upstream (projects) and downstream (distribution) with an important part about QA management by the Fedora project.

Read the slides: Paris2015.pdf.

Feedback seems good, see joind.id.

I waiting for next meetings.

I just discover the libsmbclient-php project, here some information.

I can't count the number of time I had to explain why using this library or this PHP extension is a terrible mistake. So time to blog about  it.

RPM of upcoming major version of PHP 7.0, are available in remi repository for Fedora 20, 21, 22 and Enterprise Linux 6, 7 (RHEL, CentOS, ...) in a fresh new Software Collection (php70) allowing its installation beside the system version.

NEW : Release Candidate versions are now available in remi-test repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS) to allow more people to test them. They are only available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests.

RPM of PHP version 5.6.4RC1 as SCL are available in remi-test repository for Fedora 19-21 and Enterprise Linux.

RPM of PHP version 5.5.20RC1 as SCL are available in remi-test repository for Fedora 21 and Enterprise Linux.

Continuous Integration is a common concern of all developers.

Most of projects  use some tool, like Travis (available on github.com). PHP have its own tests suite. This allow to check that each modification of the source code doesn't introduce any regression.

This seems enough for a project, but for the whole PHP stack, we need to:

• check that any dependency update doesn't break other projects using it
• check that a PHP update doesn't introduce any regression in other projects, as soon as a Release Candidate is released (PHP versions available in travis/github are often a bit outdated)
• check that packaging related change doesn't break anything

The Koschei project is an answer to those needs, by supervising updates in rawhide (development branch of Fedora) and launching scratch build of all dependent packages.

As a lot of tools, libraries and framework are available in Fedora repository, they have been added so they are now monitored, especially:

• PHP (only version 5.6 for now)
• PHPUnit and its dependencies
• Symfony
• Doctrine
• Horde
• etc

Instance URL : http://koschei.cloud.fedoraproject.org/

This new tool should have allowed us to detect sooner recent regressions introduced in PHP version 5.4.29 and 5.5.13. So I plan to import next  Release Candidate as soon as possible, so we can take benefit of this supervision.

For example, we just detect a new FTBFS in symfony test suite after the update of PHPUnit 4.2.0 (it was a packaging issue, and is already fixed).

Of course, it means we need to have a test suite for each project, and to run it during the package build, but this is, for a long time, part of the good practices.

We'll see how this tool behave, but I think it really brings an important improvement for continuous integration of the whole PHP stack.

This is also, and mostly, a tool for which results should give benefits to each project, proving the usefulness of projects collaboration (upstream / downstream), and giving even more interest, for each project, to be available in a downstream distribution, such as Fedora.