Reverting PHP to 5.2 in Lucid 10.04

[mathews.kyle]

I recently upgraded my main development laptop to Lucid. Lucid upgraded PHP to 5.3 and as I'm mainly a PHP developer, this has caused quite a few problems. What's the easiest way to revert back to the the 5.2 series? Googling hasn't found any good solutions.

[Mustang Matt]

I don't have the answer to your question, but I'm curious what problems you ran into.

[djoxyk]

I'm curious too. I have upgraded php 5.3 on lucid. It works ok.

[Bachstelze]

Originally Posted by mathews.kyle I recently upgraded my main development laptop to Lucid. Lucid upgraded PHP to 5.3 and as I'm mainly a PHP developer, this has caused quite a few problems. What's the easiest way to revert back to the the 5.2 series? Googling hasn't found any good solutions.

You could add the Karmic repositories to your sources.list and do some apt-policy magic to lock PHP to Karmic, or compile PHP 5.2 from source.

[obrienmd]

Would be _very_ intersted in this, especially if there was a PPA / named package to do this... Drupal / Open Atrium don't play nice with PHP 5.3 yet, and many of our Drupal webapps would need non-trivial updates to do so. The latest Drupal core is rumored to work well, but none of the sites we have deployed are working well on 5.3, for whatever reason (contrib modules, etc).

Cheers!

[djoxyk]

if you need just downgrade version, try to remove current version and you can use synaptic to install older one, use force version under the package menu.
i do not touch Drupal, but wordpress works ok with php 5.3

another way is to download sources of 5.2 and compile it (if there's no version in reps).

[Bachstelze]

OK, here's how to do the Apt magic to get PHP packages from the karmic repositories:

* First remove all your existing PHP packages. You can list them with e.g.:

dpkg -l | grep php

* Then duplicate your existing sources.list replacing lucid with karmic and save it in sources.list.d:

sed s/lucid/karmic/g /etc/apt/sources.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/karmic.list

* Create a file in /etc/apt/preferences.d like this (call it for example /etc/apt/preferences.d/php);

Package: php5
Pin: release a=karmic
Pin-Priority: 991

The big problem is that wildcards don't work, so you will need one such stanza for each PHP package you want to pull from karmic.

[obrienmd]

Originally Posted by Bachstelze OK, here's how to do the Apt magic to get PHP packages from the karmic repositories: * First remove all your existing PHP packages. You can list them with e.g.: dpkg -l | grep php * Then duplicate your existing sources.list replacing lucid with karmic and save it in sources.list.d: sed s/lucid/karmic/g /etc/apt/sources.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/karmic.list * Create a file in /etc/apt/preferences.d like this (call it for example /etc/apt/preferences.d/php); Package: php5 Pin: release a=karmic Pin-Priority: 991 The big problem is that wildcards don't work, so you will need one such stanza for each PHP package you want to pull from karmic.

Awesome! Love the idea... Hate the idea of having to remember to set this when adding any php package

[obrienmd]

Originally Posted by Bachstelze OK, here's how to do the Apt magic to get PHP packages from the karmic repositories: * First remove all your existing PHP packages. You can list them with e.g.: dpkg -l | grep php * Then duplicate your existing sources.list replacing lucid with karmic and save it in sources.list.d: sed s/lucid/karmic/g /etc/apt/sources.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/karmic.list * Create a file in /etc/apt/preferences.d like this (call it for example /etc/apt/preferences.d/php); Package: php5 Pin: release a=karmic Pin-Priority: 991 The big problem is that wildcards don't work, so you will need one such stanza for each PHP package you want to pull from karmic.

Actually, this seems to make apt-get / aptitude install ALL NEW packages from the karmic repositories...

[Reiger]

No it won't. It will now have *both* the Lucid and the Karmic repositories enabled side by side; and because the Lucid versions of all software is from a repository with a higher major version number than their Karmic counterparts this will make APT use Lucid repositories (it prefers latest software by default), unless specified otherwise.

That is where the preferences file comes in; it basically tells APT to prefer the karmic PHP packages to the Lucid ones.

Where this gets problematic is if PHP or associated packages depend on things like binutils that have broken their ABI or API over an upgrade. If that happens you will have Karmic PHP & related packages built for the old calling conventions confronted with the new ones and failing in interesting ways... Similarly if packages have been dropped or renamed or something like that you will have trouble to get APT to do conflict resolution and installation properly.