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Dotdeb : Debian 5.0 “Lenny” support in progress…

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.

Lenny banner

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.

What (about LAMP) has changed in Lenny?

  • Apache 1.3 has been removed, in favour of Apache 2.2. You have to migrate before any other change.
  • In addition, libapache-mod-php5 is still present, but it’s a non-sense and a cause of mistake : it depends on the missing apache-common package! You have been warned.
  • MySQL 5.0 comes in a satisfying recent release (5.0.51a) and will take profit of official Debian security releases.

What will change in the Lenny branch of Dotdeb?

  • PHP5 (5.2, 5.3, …) has now the focus and will be updated frequently, so PHP4 is not maintained anymore. PHP6 will be uploaded when it’s ready.
  • Up-to-date MySQL 5.1 packages will be provided as often as needed
  • MySQL 5.0 effort has been discontinued in favour the official Debian packages.
  • I’m wondering if I will keep maintaining the mail-related packages (Qmail, Vpopmail, Ezmlm, Qmailadmin…). If you really need them, let me know in the comments.

Should I switch to Lenny or should I stick to Etch?

It’s up to you. I will continue maintaining up-to-date packages for Etch in the next few months, so you’ll have time to upgrade your servers. Whatever you choose, you just have to take care of the Dotdeb entries in your sources.list :

  • It should refer to stable or lenny if you want to make the switch and take benefits from the brand new Debian distribution :
deb http://your.mirror/ stable all
deb-src http://your.mirror/ stable all
  • It should refer to oldstable or etch if you want to stick to the good old Etch and to take your time to upgrade.
deb http://your.mirror/ oldstable all
deb-src http://your.mirror/ oldstable all

(Please chose a mirror near your location on this page)

Conclusion

Thanks for using Dotdeb! This personnal project still aims (and will continue) to provide an efficient and up-to-date LAMP stack to your servers.

43 replies on “Dotdeb : Debian 5.0 “Lenny” support in progress…”

” * I’m wondering if I will keep maintaining the mail-related packages (Qmail, Vpopmail, Ezmlm, Qmailadmin…). If you really need them, let me know in the comments. ” – qmail is nice alternative sometimes, if it’s not big trouble don’t discontinue support for it. Thanks.

Hello,
I’ve been using your packages (php and mysql) on my etch server for a while. Great work!
Anyways, I was wondering why you don’t publish apache2.2 update packages as well: Etch is still using 2.2.3, and Lenny just 2.2.9. New versions include security fixes, along with bug fixes etc…

Hi Guillaume,

I don’t use the mail-related packages, so as far as I’m concerned: feel free to drop them. We actually do use clamav, but my colleague says he can get those from other sources, so he wouldn’t mind it if you dropped them. Thanks again for all your hard work.

No… I’m sorry: my English is not so good 🙂
I meant… Can you maintain apache2.2 too? Debian contains very old versions of this (both Etch and Lenny)…

Hi,
What about downgrade from dotdeb-etch mysql-server 5.0.67 to lenny’s official 5.0.51a? Is that without any issues?

Also I sent you email few weeks ago regarding creating a mirror of dotdeb in Slovakia (as now there is none). Did you receive it? Or on which email address can I contact you regarding this?

Thanks

Hi, Guillaume,

I do use your (q)mail packages related package on some estimated 700 servers that are to be updated to Lenny, so I would be very grateful if you could continue to update them.

From my point of view: drop the LAMP stuff instead! 😉

Thanks a lot!
– Thomas

Hey,

First of all thank you for updating to Lenny, just when I need it ;).
However, I found something strange, it seems like libmysqlclient15off from Lenny is required for a number of packages, and is not really 100% compatible with the libmysqlclient16 from Dotdeb.
I don’t expect to see any problems, but it does display something irritating in some PHP programs.

It seems like the dpkg rules don’t get the fact libmysqlclient16 is newer than libmysqlclient15off (from Lenny).

So removing libmysqlclient15off will also attempt to remove stuff like Apache.

I don’t know if this can be solved without any real trouble.

(Oh yeah, I am only using PHP / Suhosin / MySQL from Dotdeb, so if you ask me, dropping mail won’t be a problem. However I don’t think everyone would like that ;))

Thanks for Dotdeb,

Sebastian

@Thomas : I got it 🙂 I’ll try to upload new mail-related packages, but be ready to some important changes : I’ll use the http://shupp.org patchset to benefit from SPF and Domainkeys. I’ll make an announce, of course.

@Alessandro : Sorry, but I don’t intend to maintain Apache 2.2 at this time, but feel free to fill up some bugreports on http://bugs.debian.org/ to make it better

@Marki : I did the downgrade several times without any issue. For the mirror, I’l give you an answer very soon.

By Post Author

Thank you, great work!!!

I upgraded today to Lenny and nearly everything works well 🙂

The only thing I have to mention is the wordpress auto update. It says the zlib support is missing, but phpinfo() says zlib is enabled.

Do you have any idea about that?

I don’t need the mail things, but support for Apache would really be great. Hope you change your mind 🙂

I’ve got the same problem as Tuckwila. Upgrade to Lenny went fine. Everything is working except the auto-updates from WordPress. It always says “Missing zlib extensions” although phpinfo() shows me an enabled and working zlib-extension. Any ideas why?

@Lucky Linux : No, but take a look at http://www.backports.org/. They provide what you are looking for.

@Tuckwila, @ midshipman : I’ll take a look at this issue and post a comment about it soon.

@Tuckwila : The libmyslclient version shown in phpinfo has nothing to do with your system library. It just means that PHP has been built against 5.0.77. I had no other choice : compiling PHP against 5.1 would cause issues when mysql-linked Apache modules or PHP extensions are loaded.
This behavior will change with PHP 5.3 as mysql native driver will replace libmysqlclient in all the MySQL-related extensions : http://docs.php.net/manual/en/mysqli.mysqlnd.php

By Post Author

@Sebastian : there is no known incompatibility between the libmysqlclient15off that PHP and all the Apache-related stuff are linked to, and the MySQL 5.1 and libmysqlclient16 packages.
PHPMyAdmin shows some annoying message that can easily be suppressed, but there’s no major issue with such a configuration. libmysqlclient15off and libmysqlclient16 can coexist safely on the same system.
As said before, this “cosmetic” problem will be fixed with the inclusion of mysql natide driver in PHP 5.3.

By Post Author

I’ve got the same problem as Tuckwila and midshipman. Everything updated fine but zlib doesn’t work. phpinfo sais it’s enabled but function_exists(‘gzopen’) returns false …

Do you have a eta for a fix?

I´m running MySQL-Version: 5.1.31-Dotdeb_0.dotdeb.0 and I tried to update and upgrade, but some packages have been kept back with following message:

Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree… Done
The following packages have been kept back:
libapache2-mod-php5 libmysqlclient16 mysql-client-5.1 mysql-server-5.1 php5-cgi php5-cli php5-common php5-dev php5-gd
php5-mysql
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 10 not upgraded.

what can I do to upgrade anyway and do you think this can cause problems ?

Thanx

Hey, I love dotdeb great work thankyou for putting your time and effort in! i would really like to see you continue with mail … if you remove qmail i would probably cry for a week..

So im with lucien on this “if it’s not big trouble don’t discontinue support for it. Thanks.”

@medusa : Are you upgrading from Etch to Lenny with a clean sources.list? Try to use dselect or aptitude to know which package or which dependency causes this “issue”.

By Post Author

Hi Guillaume

Thanks again for your great work. I use your packages since several years and i’ve always been enjoyed with them.
I expect *** you won’t drop mail-related packages *** which works fine for the moment even i’ve upgraded to lenny.

Hi Guillaume,

wordpress works fine now, thanx!

Could you maybe provide lenny packages for mod_security? Due to license problems it’s not part of official lenny repositories (but was in etch and will be in sid again) and I wasn’t able to find an up-to-date lenny repo for it. I don’t want to install it manually cause I have to check all time for security updates than.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR GOOD WORK!

Hi Guillaume,

Thanks for all your hard work. Your Debian packages fixed my PHP problem a few months ago.
I’m very new to many things Linux so I’m guessing this is not the correct place to post this but I don’t understand how to navigate to another place and post.
I have a quick question that is way off topic relative to your web site, mirrors. I’m trying to create an OFF-line mirror from CDs. I have some of the mirror working but I don’t see how to import new debs etc. What tool do you use and/ or do you have any recommendations?
Thanks in advance,
Brian

@brian : I have no idea how to burn an install CD with a csutom set of packages (I never did that before), but perhaps some visitors here could answer your question.

BTW, If you need a temporary rsync access to fetch the Dotdeb packages (instead of leeching them using wget or httrack or…), please mail me your IP address.

By Post Author

Thank god I found this post…

I have been pounding my head on the desk for hours trying to upgrade a production Etch server from php4 to php5 and was getting “unmet dependencies” and “not installable” errors from aptitude. I didn’t realize it was the sources for dotdeb pointing to “stable” – changing to “oldstable” made all my upgrades go smoothly.

Thanks!

Firstly, thanks for dotdeb. 😉

I’ve got a Debian Etch with libmysqlclient15off version 5.0.75-0.dotdeb.0, no problem.

I’m installing a test server with Debian Lenny. Both libmysqlclient15off (5.0.51a-24) and libmysqlclient16 (5.1.33-0.dotdeb.1) are installed. I understand that’s not a problem to have these two libmysqlclient versions… Why doesn’t dotdeb provide updates for 5.0 which is actually the version used by PHP and Apache (if I understand) ?

@JL : I will not maintain MySQL 5.0 for Lenny :
– MySQL 5.1 is now the main branch “GA” and MySQL 5.0 will be deprecated in a near future
– MySQL 5.0 is well maintained by the Dotdeb team

Sorry

By Post Author

Hey Guillaume, why don’t you have Apache packages? Debian is usually far behind on those releases and slow to include security fixes that Apache has already fixed in their own source packages. Recently I had a customer who failed a PCI compliance because of cross site scripting vulnerability. We were using the latest Apache from the Lenny repository. I had to go to the Sid repository and grab 2.2.11-6 and install it manually and then they were able to pass the PCI compliance. Is there any reason you don’t maintain Apache packages as well? Other than Apache, we are running the latest stable PHP from you, 5.2.9 with some pecl installed modules, mailparse and apc-3.1.2. Also, thank you for providing us with all of the packages you do. Is there anything I can do to help? I’m not a programmer but I do have a server with lots of bandwidth and available I/O to share. Just let me know.

Hi, Guillaume!

I’m a grateful user of your qmail (and related) packages. Now I need to “patch” qmail according to http://cr.yp.to/qmail/faq/admin.html#copies to comply with current german regislation concerning mail archiving. A trivial change, it seemed.

So I got me a copy of your qmail source packages (qmail_1.03-40.dotdeb.1.diff.gz, qmail_1.03-40.dotdeb.1.dsc, qmail_1.03.orig.tar.gz), changed extra.h and tried to rebuild the package with dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc

I get this error:

for patch in debian/patches/*.patch; do \
echo ‘->’`basename $patch`:; \
if ! patch -p1 –ignore-whitespace –dry-run < $patch; \
then \
exit 1; \
fi; \
patch -p1 –ignore-whitespace *.patch:
/bin/sh: line 2: debian/patches/*.patch: No such file or directory

Indeed, the patches directory is empty. Is this a bug in the source package or do you apply your patches and build the dotdeb qmail packages in some other way?

Thanks a lot!
– Thomas

@Thomas : THe patching process in the (very old) qmail package is tricky , and buggy. It works only one time. My build process :

apt-get source qmail
cd qmail-1.03
./debian/rules binary

By Post Author

[Guillaume, I sent you this via mail but I guess maybe you get too much mail…]

Ok, I tried that, but:

root@ishmael:/home/thk/workspace/eclipse/dotdeb/qmail-1.03#
./debian/rules binary
test “`whoami`” = root
for patch in debian/patches/*.patch; do \
echo ‘->’`basename $patch`:; \
if ! patch -p1 –ignore-whitespace –dry-run < $patch; \
then \
exit 1; \
fi; \
patch -p1 –ignore-whitespace *.patch:
/bin/sh: line 2: debian/patches/*.patch: No such file or directory
make: *** [build] Error 1

I edited debian/rules and commented the patches directory for-loop.
Building now starts, but stop with this message:

[…]
./compile auto-str.c
auto-str.c:8: warning: conflicting types for built-in function ‘puts’
auto-str.c: In function ‘main’:
auto-str.c:17: warning: return type of ‘main’ is not ‘int’
./load auto-str substdio.a error.a str.a
/usr/bin/ld: errno: TLS definition in /lib/libc.so.6 section .tbss
mismatches non-TLS reference in substdio.a(substdo.o)
/lib/libc.so.6: could not read symbols: Bad value
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[1]: *** [auto-str] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/thk/workspace/eclipse/dotdeb/qmail-1.03’
make: *** [build] Error 2

Hmm. What does that mean?

(Build environment is Debian 5.0.2.)

Any help much appreciated! Thanks!
– Thomas

Please continue to maintain mail related packages You mentioned. They’re really useful.
Thanks!

Hi,

please don’t drop support for mail-related packages.
Is there a webpage or something else to see what patches have already included into your qmail-package?

Thanks.

@Herbert : Sorry, but I will discontinue the support on the mail-related packages with the Squeeze release.
You could build the package by yourself (and see what patches are included) by using the source packages (apt-get source qmail).

By Post Author

Hi,

thanks for your fast repsonse. Sorry to hear that you will not continue the packages.
I’m right now trying to compile the stuff by myself.
I downloaded the libdomainkeys-package , i echod “-lresolv” into dns.lib, but when i try to “./debian/rules binary” i get the following error:
—
./compile qmail-dk.c
qmail-dk.c: In function ‘main’:
qmail-dk.c:163: warning: return type of ‘main’ is not ‘int’
make[1]: *** Keine Regel vorhanden, um das Target »/usr/lib/libdomainkeys.a«,
benötigt von »qmail-dk«, zu erstellen. Schluss.
make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/qmail/qmail-1.03′
make: *** [build] Fehler 2
—

which says,:” There is no rule to create target »/usr/lib/libdomainkeys.a« which is used by qmail-dk”

Maybe you have a hint where the error could come from?

TiA
Herbert

Does qmail & ezmlm-idx work in the Lenny?

Although qmail is delivered OK, I get
deferral: ezmlm-send:_fatal:_temporary_qmail-queue_error:_unable_to_exec_qq_(#4.3.0)

when an attempt is made to deliver data to the mailing list.
Also qfixq complains sometimes about the gid of the queues that are created…

@Guillaume Plessis

Great !

As you can see – continuing qmail support makes sense.

Thanks

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