[php-maint] Bug#676972: 5.4.6 issues, also drupal7 weirdness

[Dennis Boone]

Additional data points that may or may not be related:

For all of the following, the host system is sid i386.

I'm having Drupal7 weirdness since applying updates and ending up at (I
think) 5.4.4-7 on 8/22.  Drupal is at 7.14-1.  This setup runs under
nginx.  The error logs look like this:

Sep  5 15:31:56 www ool www: PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function <B0>K() in /usr/share/drupal7/index.php on line 17
Sep  5 15:31:57 www ool www: PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function <B0>K() in /usr/share/drupal7/index.php on line 17
Sep  5 15:32:05 www ool www: PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function (^N0BÔ‚
<9D>@() in /usr/share/drupal7/includes/bootstrap.inc on line 11
Sep  5 15:32:15 www ool www: PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function <B0>K() in /usr/share/drupal7/index.php on line 17

Note the control characters instead of actual function names, and that
they change from request to request.  A 500 is returned to the client.

I'm also having weirdness with Apache (2.2.22-11, mod-php loaded) not
stopping when asked, where the master process locks up and can only be
killed -9.  This doesn't occur every time.

====

So with this bug and the above as context, and knowing that surgery is
in progress to adapt to php4, prepare for apache 2.4, etc, I tried the
5.4.6 packages from experimental.

After applying the experimental packages, mod-php under apache
(mpm-prefork) sometimes (some workers, maybe?) throws errors similar to
the ones above, with garbage in the logged errors.  I also saw fpm hang
at startup a few times with
5.4.6.

I've gone back to all-sid packages for now, as this is a production
machine.

====

Sorry this is so disorganized.  Not sure what bits are relevant, and
what might belong in a different bug report.

De