This time I got to ask the lazyweb, or the Gentoo powerusers at least, some help for my tinderbox; with PHP and the PHP packages. As an introduction, since I know not all users understand what the tinderbox is and this time I’m asking all users, consider my tinderbox like the ultimate Gentoo system. It’s a simple chroot where as many packages as possible gets built, installed and merged, or at least it tries to.
Most of the problems found in the tinderbox are not really tinderbox-specific; they are generic failures with the latest compiler and glibc, or failures with the most recent version of a library, in a package that is rarely used; basically they are bugs that could be reported by anybody, but the tinderbox makes it easier to report them since I receive all of them in series.
In the recent weeks I started reporting test phase failures too; thanks to Portage’s test-fail-continue feature, I don’t need to skip over all the packages when their tests fails, like it would happen with just tests enabled normally, but it still takes time, and more than a couple of packages tend to freeze during test phases.
Unfortunately, I’m having some problems with the testing of some PHP PECL extensions: the only thing that the log says is the following:
>>> Test phase [test]: dev-php5/pecl-timezonedb-2008.8
make -j14 -j1 test
Build complete.
Don't forget to run 'make test'.
ERROR: Cannot run tests without CLI sapi.The obvious answer here is to make sure that the CLI (command line interface) version of PHP is built, but, well, it is! The cli USE flag on the PHP ebuild is enabled in the tinderbox, and yet the tests fail. I’ve asked Christian (hoffie) about this but his interest in PHP does not extend to PECL, and the rest of the PHP team seems to be missing in action.
If somebody has an idea on what the problem is here, I’d be very glad to hear about it.
Similarly, all, or almost all the PEAR-based packages fail to install in my tinderbox; I’ve opened a bug where you can find the details, although there aren’t many; the pear command ends up failing without any notice at all.
And of course this also means that if you’re interested in working on our PHP team, especially on the PEAR and PECL extensions, your help is very needed right now!