Debian 8.0 Jessie has been released, and what it means for Dotdeb

April 26, 2015 · Guillaume Plessis

Good news, guys : Debian 8.0 Jessie has been released on April 25th 2015. Huge kudos to all the Debian developers who made this happen!

Jessie already includes the following components by default :

PHP 5.6.7
MariaDB 1.0.16 and MySQL 5.5.42
Nginx 1.6.2

That means that in the next few days/weeks (thanks in advance for your patience), Dotdeb will progressively provide the following packages for Jessie :

Nginx, latest stable release
Redis, latest release
Zabbix LTS
Last but not least, PHP 7 once it’s declared as stable

That also means that Dotdeb won’t provide these packages for Jessie :

PHP 5, which latest version is already included in Jessie
MySQL, already included in Jessie in MySQL 5.5 or MariaDB 10.0 flavors.

As a consequence for you :

“Wheezy/PHP 5.6” users should migrate to “Jessie/PHP 5.6
“Wheezy/MySQL 5.6” users should stick to Wheezy before migrating to “Jessie/MariaDB 10.0”

Please also note that :

We’ll support Debian 6 “Squeeze” until the end of its Long Term Support (February 2016),
as well as Debian 7 “Wheezy” with its current set of packages until its end of life.
The archive symlinks has been adjusted to make Jessie stable, wheezy oldstable, squeeze oldoldstable. Please make sure that your sources.list is up-to-date

I hope you will enjoy this great new major Debian release and that Dotdeb will keep being useful to you.

Vasilis Lourdas April 26, 2015
I’ve always respected your work with the dotdeb repository, providing the latest PHP packages for our favorite server distro and I thank you for that (and I’m sure many others too). I just wish that you provided 5.5 packages for Jessie. The latest is not always the greatest. There are applications written for 5.4 and they would surely need thorough testing before moving not just to 5.5, but straight to 5.6. And what about newer than 5.6.7 versions in Jessie, even if one decides to move from 5.4 or 5.5 to 5.6? After a year or so, I’m pretty sure the 5.6 branch will be 12 or more versions later and it means without your help, we would stick with 5.6.7.
In any case, thank you.
- Guillaume Plessis April 26, 2015
  @Vasilis Lourdas : Debian may do with Jessie/php5.6 what they did with Wheezy/php5.4 as of DSA-3064 : packaging the latest upstream version. If they don’t and the situation becomes problematic, then we may decide to provide up-to-date PHP 5.6 packages. But it will require some additional work and some support from our users :)
  And Wheezy is still there, you can stick to it in the meantime.
thomas April 26, 2015
will the jessie php 5.6 version be kept current? IMO thats the main advantage of dotdeb: always the most current stable php version, whereas the php versions in the main debian repositories used to be quite old…
- Guillaume Plessis April 26, 2015
  @Thomas : Debian may do with Jessie/php5.6 what they did with Wheezy/php5.4 as of DSA-3064 : packaging the latest upstream version. If they don’t and the situation becomes problematic, then we may decide to provide up-to-date PHP 5.6 packages. But it will require some additional work and some support from our users :)
  And Wheezy is still there, you can stick to it in the meantime.
Sébastien April 26, 2015
Bonsoir Guillaume !
Mince, moi qui suis en train de monter un nouveau serveur en Debian 7, cela pourrait changer mes plans… D’un autre côté je ne trouve pas cette 8 très mature encore… Choix difficile…
Côté Nginx, comptes-tu travailler sur la nouvelle mouture en 1.8 ?
Merci pour ton travail et bonne continuation !
- Guillaume Plessis April 27, 2015
  @Sébastien : Wheezy est toujours d’actualité, de même que Squeeze, comme évoqué dans ce billet. Nains 1.8 sera disponible pour les trois distribs d’ici quelques jour.
  - Sébastien April 27, 2015
    Ok,merci pour ce retour :)
JCG April 27, 2015
Thank you very much for the info and for all your great work, Guillaume!
PHP 5.6.x for Jessie from Dotdeb would be highly appreciated in case Debian should not provide newer versions of the 5.6 branch.
add apt repo – install PHP 5.6.x from dotdeb.org (on debian wheezy) | ulf's notebook April 27, 2015
[…] Attention: This article refers to Dotdeb’s PHP 5.6 repo for Debian Wheezy. As PHP 5.6 is part of Debian Jessie, please note Dotdeb’s advice. […]
Morten M Riis April 28, 2015
Does that mean that you don’t see people using MySQL 5.6 on jessie and that they should migrate to MariaDB? Personally I would like to see MySQL 5.6 for jessie now that we’re running it on wheezy with no intention (unfortunately) of migrating to MariaDB.
- Guillaume Plessis April 28, 2015
  @Morten M Riis : I’ll see what I can do, but another way would be to use MySQL official packages (http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/repo/apt/). You can also stick to Wheezy until its end of life.
Machika April 30, 2015
My guess is when php 5.7 or php7 (what ever they go with) comes out debian will not follow upto date support on it and hopefully dotdeb will save us again.
Ed May 3, 2015
I upgraded one wheezy to jessie (an x64 amd) usingt aptitude and apt-get and heads up because if you are running apache 2.2 it will upgrade you to 2.4 (which is far better in ability and capability and performance optimisation, but which means redoing all of your vhosts - different kinds of declarations are necessary), and, of course all sites are down, and many apps like ISPConfig 3, etc are unreachable after the upgrade, until you modify the vhost declarations, perhaps more in the case of apps. Thanks for the great work keeping us up-to-date Guillaume!
- Guillaume Plessis May 3, 2015
  @Ed : so sorry to hear. You have to be very careful when upgrading to Jessie and all the major branches of installed pieces of software, especially when it deal with 3rd-party products such as ISPconfig.
  Do you confirm that your disappointment isn’t in any way caused by Dotdeb? I’ll publish packages for Wheezy soon, and I’ll keep maintaining these for Squeeze and Wheezy, with compatibility with stock Debian distros in mind.
Philippe Villiers May 5, 2015
When MySQL 5.7 will reach GA, will you make it available for Jessie?
- Guillaume Plessis May 5, 2015
  @Philippe Villiers : not sure yet. MariaDB is a really good alternative.
  - Vasilis Lourdas May 5, 2015
    @Philippe Really, MariaDB is a much better alternative (though to be honest, the latest couple of years, I’ve come to hate MySQL and all their forks, my projects now use PostgreSQL). MariaDB provides official repositories for Debian and when a new version is released they are almost instantly updated. Not to mention their excellent support in their bug reporting system, they respond to tickets in a matter of hours (or even minutes). That’s just some of the reasons big Linux distros made MariaDB their default MySQL based database.
Morten M Riis May 5, 2015
I agree on MariaDB. Some of us are just stuck with customers that use MySQL :(
Jeremias M May 6, 2015
Hi, how do you install HHVM on Debian 8.
MariaDB and Nginx is installed with server configuration i think, in Debian netinstall.
Kevin May 6, 2015
Hello,
can you please continue providing the latest version of PHP 5.6 for Jessie?
As you can see, Debian 8 currents PHP stable is (still) 5.6.7 - you did provide PHP 5.6.8 within one week after the release on php.net
Thats the reason, why I choose to use Dotdeb :)
- Guillaume Plessis May 6, 2015
  @Kevin : what’s the point of duplicating Debian’s effort to provide PHP 5.6 for Jessie? They do a great job and they’ll make sure to backport security updates during the 5 next years. They even may do with Jessie/php5.6 what they did with Wheezy/php5.4 as of DSA-3064 : packaging the latest upstream version.
TimWolla May 8, 2015
What would I need to do to properly upgrade wheezy-dotdeb/PHP 5.6 to jessie/PHP 5.6? The version number of the Dotdeb package is higher and thus the existing version won’t be replaced. First a remove and then upgrade to jessie + reinstall of PHP or is apt pinning recommended here?
How would I cleanly upgrade to Jessie + MariaDB? Will this work: Remove MySQL, upgrade to jessie and then install MariaDB?
Thanks!
- Guillaume Plessis May 9, 2015
  @TimWolla : for PHP, uninstalling then re-installing is the best solution until Debian releases a higher version, if they do.
  For MariaDB, because the default data_dir is still /var/lib/mysql, the migration is pretty seamless (I did it on some of my servers). You just have to be extra careful is you are currently using deprecated/unsupported configuration directives.
  In both cases, backup your config and data before the migration.
TimWolla May 9, 2015
@Guillaume Thanks. The update went fine and I am now running the official PHP 5.6 and MariaDB. In case someone else is wondering, that’s how I did it:
1. apt-get remove php5-common mysql-common
2. Update sources.list
3. apt-get upgrade
4. apt-get dist-upgrade
5. Install the PHP packages removed in step 1.
6. Install mariadb-server
7. Install the MySQL packages removed in step 1 (such as php5-mysqlnd or dovecot-mysql)
8. Reboot
- whomass May 15, 2015
  Awesome, Tim! Thanks for sharing.