New open source software is coming out and wants to use PHP5.

Meanwhile, old open source software has been heavily modded and can't be updated to the latest release that has been fixed for PHP5.

And you really don't have the time, resources or willpower to go through a cesspool of community-spewed, fermented, piece of trash code to fix it.

Better let it run under PHP4.

It's a possible scenario.

There are many articles dealing with that theme:

• http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/php/php4-php5-configuration.xml, in the Gentoo Guides.
• http://timdorr.com/archives/2006/02/php4_and_php4_s.php, by Vivek.

Below, you will find the quick and dirty, step-by-step guide I used to setup the following:

• PHP4 using mod_php (because the bulk of my PHP needs runs PHP4)
• PHP5 using mod_fastcgi
• Then, you can configure paths (or whole domains) to run with whatever PHP version you like.

Reading about the new features in MySQL 5.x go me really excited about upgrading.

See, we're running 4.1 on our production servers. Being a careful person, I decided to fit one of our dev machines with MySQL 5.0 to see how the switch would go.

I will now detail the steps on how I got OTRS working using mod_fastcgi instead of mod_perl.

In my spare time, I've been trying to get OTRS to work with acceptable performance on my Gentoo box.

OTRS is a very complete perl-based Ticket Trackign system. Using Perl as simple CGI simply kicks the sh*t out of my home box's CPU.

I wanted to run it under mod_perl.

That was back in july...

Trying to do a system-wide gentoo update using emerge, I ran into a compile error trying to update glibc:

*** These critical programs are missing or too old: gcc
*** Check the INSTALL file for required versions.

!!!ERROR: sys-libs/glibc-2.4-r4 failed.
Call stack:
ebuild.sh, line 1546: Called dyn_compile
ebuild.sh, line 937: Called src_compile
glibc-2.4-r4.ebuild, line 1174: Called toolchain-glibc_src_compile
glibc-2.4-r4.ebuild, line 257: Called glibc_do_configure 'nptl'
glibc-2.4-r4.ebuild, line 925: Called die