Testing PHPNG on Debian/Ubuntu

We (at Zend) want to help people get more involved in testing PHPNG (PHP next generation), so we’re started to provide binaries for it, although it’s still a branch on top of PHP’s master branch. See more details about PHPNG on Zeev Suraski’s blog post.

The binaries (64bit) are compatible with Debian testing/unstable and Ubuntu Trusty (14.04) and up. The mod_php is built for Apache 2.4 which all three flavors have.

The repository is at http://repos.zend.com/zend-server/early-access/phpng/

Installation instructions:

# wget http://repos.zend.com/zend.key -O- 2> /dev/null | apt-key add –
# echo “deb [arch=amd64] http://repos.zend.com/zend-server/early-access/phpng/ trusty zend” > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/phpng.list
# apt-get update
# apt-get install php5

For the task of providing these binaries, I had a pleasure of combining my experience as a member of the Debian PHP team and a Debian Developer with stuff more internal to the PHP development process. Using the already existing Debian packaging enabled me to test more builds scenarios easily (and report problems accoredingly). Hopefully this could also be translated back into providing more experimental packages for Debian and making sure Debian packages are ready for the PHP released after PHP 5.6.