[CentOS] Fwd: EPEL-ANNOUNCE Re: Upcoming OwnCloud changes in EPEL

[James Hogarth]

On 22 May 2016 07:01, "John R Pierce" <pierce at hogranch.com> wrote:
>
> On 5/21/2016 6:03 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
>>
>> i started to look at SCL and got lost pretty quickly.   I'm not running
OwnCloud but I've got some other php stuff thats getting increasingly
unhappy about the stock c6 php...
>
>
> ok, I've installed php54-1.1-5.el6.centos.alt.x86_64 ...    if I run
`scl enable php54`, will that connect it up to my existing apache, so it
just works, or will that blow the heck out of everything on my host, or
something else?  I'm currently using php-5.3.3-46.el6_7.1.x86_64
>

The scl enable stuff just affects the command passed. It has no system wide
level effect. This is why to get a terminal session with it in affect you
use scl enable php54 bash ... then that session will show php 5.4 when
running the php binary.

The documentation on how to actually use it for something like php in
Apache is terrible, and the general blogs on it are awful overall. Things
like doing source /opt/rh/foo/enable seem to be frequently mentioned
despite not being what the RH docs say.

There's also a lot of confusion between the CentOS SIG SCL stuff, the
official RHEL SCL stuff and the generic softwarecollections.org stuff.

As for mod_php from an SCL from my discussions with Remi on the topic he
prefers to use php-fpm in that situation rather than mod_php since that
then allows use of different php versions via passing that particular
application to a different pool and also allows you to move away from the
worker mpm and on top a more performant one since the thread safety issues
are then bypassed.

Do keep in mind that the repos only have the base php packages IIRC and
that still leaves the question of packages for all the other php libraries.
For something like upstream php that bundles everything is not a big deal,
but for other things it can be.

Personally I still prefer to use IUS in this use case due to the simpler
set up and larger repository of php libraries built against it.

Perhaps I'll dive into a blog post soon™ negotiating through this stuff
with decent examples of how to make use of the various methods, along with
their pros and cons. The question comes up frequently enough on #centos
that it'd be good to have a decent write up to refer to... and with a long
time till C6 EOL and RH relying heavily on SCL for PHP5.4+ (rather than
rebasing the php in the base distro) on it I'm sure it'll become an even
more common question than it already is.

Still none of the options (RH SCL, SIG SCL, SCL.org, IUS, RemiRepo) help us
EPEL since we can only depend on what's in base or EPEL for package
dependencies, and all efforts to get SCL approved in the Fedora Packaging
Guidelines have been rejected over the past few years.