CentOS - Nov 2017 - PHP package versions

Hi everyone,

http://php.net/eol.php says that PHP 5.5 and 5.4 are EOL, but a freshly
installed Centos 7 box, then fully upgraded, gives me PHP 5.4.16-42.el7. What do
people do about maintaining current versions of software on a variety of
machines? We have some users who manage their own machines, and would rather not
force them to jump through hoops of managing repos to get later versions.

I just hope I've missed something straightforward, and that someone here can
offer advice.

TIA,
Greg.

> 
> http://php.net/eol.php says that PHP 5.5 and 5.4 are EOL, but a
> freshly installed Centos 7 box, then fully upgraded, gives me PHP
> 5.4.16-42.el7. What do people do about maintaining current versions
> of software on a variety of machines? We have some users who manage
> their own machines, and would rather not force them to jump through
> hoops of managing repos to get later versions.
> 
> I just hope I've missed something straightforward, and that someone
> here can offer advice.
> 
That's not the point of an enterprise distro. The point is that once a
distro version is released the versions of the software contained
therein does not change. The OS predictably uses certain versions so
that it is a known environment.

Yes, those versions are EOL, but RedHat spends vast amounts of money
back porting security (and bug) fixes from later versions into the EOL
versions so that they remain a viable option for the life of that
particular version of the distro - that's what the '-42' on the
version
is all about.

If you *need* the most recent versions you have two options. Firstly
you could use a more dynamic distro (F26 has PHP 7.1) - but you will
need to upgrade every 12 months (preferably every 6 months). Second,
you could use Software Collections - they have PHP 5.5, 5.6, 7.0
packaged in a way that's safe to use in RHEL/CentOS. There are also
repositories that have other versions of PHP in them (such as Remi).

What you really, really must not do is to replace the default installed
version of the various things in CentOS - that has the potential to
break many things. (I heard of someone who replaced the default version
of Python in CentOS with the latest greatest one - panic and confusion
ensued.)

P.

On 2/11/17 4:50 pm, Pete Biggs wrote:
> Yes, those versions are EOL, but RedHat spends vast amounts of money
> back porting security (and bug) fixes from later versions into the EOL
> versions so that they remain a viable option for the life of that
> particular version of the distro - that's what the '-42' on the
version
> is all about.
This is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to hear. I'll take a closer
look at this late next week and work out how to communicate it to the relevant
people here. Thank you for the prompt, helpful response.

Greg.

>
> http://php.net/eol.php says that PHP 5.5 and 5.4 are EOL, but a freshly
> installed Centos 7 box, then fully upgraded, gives me PHP 5.4.16-42.el7.
> What do people do about maintaining current versions of software on a
> variety of machines?

If you need more up to date versions of PHP then these can be installed
using the Redhat maintained Software Collections repository.

https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/

I've been using this system for up to date Python, PHP and Node versions
for a good while and have found it reliable.