Preview : PHP 5.5.0 RC3 for Debian 7.0 “Wheezy”

If everything goes well, PHP 5.5.0 will be available later this month. This major release brings better overall performance and a lot of new features.

On June 6th 2013, the PHP group has released the third release candidate of PHP 5.5.0. As a consequence, I’m proud to announce that the corresponding packages are now available on Dotdeb for Debian 7.0 “Wheezy”, on both amd64 and i386 architectures.

To upgrade to PHP 5.5.0-RC3, just add these two lines to your sources.list :

deb http://packages.dotdeb.org wheezy-php55 all
deb-src http://packages.dotdeb.org wheezy-php55 all

Please note that :

• these packages are a preview, do not use them in production!
• PHP 5.4 will still be considered as default branch on Debian 7.0
• php5-apc is not available for PHP 5.5. Instead, PHP OPcache (the open-sourced Zend Optimizer+) has been included and activated by default in php5-common. And if you need a user cache, please install php5-apcu.
• php5-http and php5-xcache are missing too. Don’t upgrade if you need them.
• PHP 5.5 won’t be packaged for Debian 6.0 “Squeeze”. Upgrade to Wheezy instead.

Please read the NEWS file and the migration guide (be aware of the backward incompatible changes) before upgrading. Of course, your feedbacks are welcome.

I’d also like to thank the Debian PHP maintainers for their huge work on PHP 5.5 (relevant feedbacks will be transferred to them).

Last but not least, if you like Dotdeb, feel free to show your support.