2012-05-09 - Pierre Schmitz

PHP has been updated to its latest major release 5.4. The upstream changelog can be found at the ChangeLog for PHP 5, a detailed migration guide is available. In addition to this the following packaging changes have been made:

The Suhosin patch and extension have been removed. Learn more about the reasoning behind this decision at PHP 5.4.1 in – Suhosin out. If you had used the suhosin extension before remove the php-suhosin package as it is no longer compatible with PHP 5.4.

Note that the extension API has been changed. If you are using any third party extensions that are not in our repositories, you have to at least recompile them or update to a compatible version.

The json module is now built into PHP itself. Therefore, remove the extension=json.so directive from your php.ini file.

directive from your php.ini file. The gd extension has been built with webp support using the libvpx library.

Make sure to merge the changes of php.ini into your local copy; or probably easier: adjust the new php.ini to your needs. If you any encounter problems using the APC extension you may try the php-xcache package which has been added to the repository.

Last but not least: especially if you are running old scripts, make sure they do not rely on features like "Safe Mode" or "Magic Quotes". As these features were removed, an update to PHP 5.4 will result in serious security holes.