[Bug 809400] Re: Cannot compile any version of PHP I want on Lucid due to dependencies in apache2-prefork-dev

[RedScourge]

Sorry for being rude, but as you might imagine this whole situation was
frustrating, and it was not the first time some little thing about
Ubuntu LTS caused me much main and suffering. Not as much as RedHat but
that's another story. Getting logged in and posting was even more
frustrating as the site intentionally makes it hard to post bug reports
to keep out the stupid people I guess, and it's even harder when under
maintenance as it was at the time. I can see how one might get tired of
frustrated users, but then again that is almost entirely who comes here.

You may call needing to run PHP 5.2.X with the PHP version of the GD
library on a recent server distro not "sane", but I wouldn't call a
server distribution that does not offer an option for PHP 5.2.X with its
included GD library as an option particularly "sane" either. I guess we
server admins think you OS developers are insane, and you OS developers
think we server admins are insane. I can only imagine then what the
customers think of us then when we tell them they need to pay over
$20,000 to port all their legacy code to PHP 5.3.X if they want a server
OS that is still eligible for security updates.

Anyways, what I am trying to say is unless someone in this situation
such as myself is willing to do something that is apparently not "sane",
they cannot run their PHP code on Ubuntu LTS distributions, and this is
all because two mildly related dev packages incorrectly claim that they
depend on their corresponding non-dev packages. I hear this was solved
in PHP 5.3.X as there is a seperate version of PHP and/or GD library
that uses PHP's version of the GD library, but again, 5.3.X is not an
option here.

I read online about installing 5.2.X on Lucid, and heard that you can
just mess with /etc/apt/sources.list to let you install PHP 5.2.X from
Karmic onto Lucid, then lock those packages to the Karmic versions so
that they do not update to the Lucid versions, and you're good to go.
Unfortunately, PHP made their own GD library version and you guys did
not want to use it due to security concerns, so instead I used a Karmic
source package, made it use PHP's GD library instead of the Ubuntu
system version, and tried to compile that as a solution, whereupon I ran
into the previously mentioned dependency issues.

If you know of a better AND simpler way for the thousands of server
admins like me who need to install the PHP 5.2.X and PHP GD library on
Lucid, PLEASE let us know as it would benefit us all. I know you do not
want people posting bug reports about this stuff, and we don't want to
have to bang our heads on the desk this many times to just get it to
work.

I realize this will all probably either fall on deaf ears, or be too
long to read and ignored, and so not fixed. That's okay however, my main
concern is that people doing Google searches about this same issue might
find this bug report and thus learn how to solve the problem.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/809400

Title:
  Cannot compile any version of PHP I want on Lucid due to dependencies
  in apache2-prefork-dev

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