[NBLUG/talk] php 4 vs. php 5 -- which to use? how to maintain?

[Dave Sisley]

Hey, everybody:

I've been playing with and tweaking a program called php Point of Sale 
<http://phppointofsale.com/> and it runs (not surprisingly) on php.  
Trouble is, the code was written in/for php 4 and it appears to have a 
tough time running with php 5.  I'm using an old RH9 server with php 4 
on it for now.

My dilemma is that I'd like to run this app on a box running FC4 and be 
able to keep the machine 'yum updated'.  I'm curious what others have 
done.  I see that php still offers 4.4.2 right there next to  5.1.2.  I 
also see that Fedora's FC4 rpm repository 
(http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/4/i386/ 
-- I'm assuming that's where it would come from...) has version 5.0.4 
available, but not anything for php 4.

I found a how-to <http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-php4-fc4.html> 
that walks through the process of removing php5 and installing php4 
(from the FC3 update repository 
<http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/3/i386/> 
where they have php-4.3.11).  I'm not sure that's the right solution.  I 
could install php 4 and then instruct yum to NOT update it, but I think 
that I might miss bug/security fixes.

Thanks for any advice!

-dave.

-- 
Dave Sisley
dsisley at sonic.net
roth-sisley.net