[php-maint] Bug#693856: php5: Please provide PHP 5.3 as well

[Michael Holzt]

Package: php5
Severity: wishlist

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Hi there,

Debian Wheezy comes with PHP 5.4. Unfortunately this release of PHP breaks
a lot of sites because some functions formerly used for session management
have been removed.

This makes upgrading from PHP 5.3 (as of Debian Squeeze) to the current
stable version difficult to impossible.

In my opinion it would be great if you could provide PHP 5.3 packages
in Debian Wheezy as well. Of course some packages would conflict (there
can't be two versions of libapache2-mod-php5 be installed at the
same time), but for example it would be perfectly fine to have both
versions of php5-cgi installed. 

In many cases people choose to install suphp plus php5-cgi. In such
a scenario it would be rather easy to configure the system to use
php5.3 for specific virtual hosts and php5.4 for others. This would
solve this problem for many users.

In general I would like to suggest to use "versioned" package names
in general for PHP in the future. Have php5-php5.3-cgi and 
php5-php5.4-cgi (or similar names) and let both of them provide
php5-cgi.

As PHP has a bad track record for making incompatible changes in
there releases, this would greatly help many users again.

Thank you.


- -- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

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