Stupid Gentoo Linux and Deprecation of Apache 1.x

Grrr….. while I appreciate that Apache 1.x is old and busted and it’s long past due to have converted to the new hotness of Apache 2.x, it really sucks to have your server’s OS distribution simply deprecate the package and disable the ability to build it as well as anything that depends on it.

About 2 weeks ago Gentoo packages for Apache 1.x were masked in portage, which basically means they are marked for removal and the next time you update the system you get a message saying that the the Apache 1 packages are blocking the Apache 2 packages, and you have to remove them before going forward. Not a huge deal, I’ve heard that this was coming for a while. However, I was a slacker about it. So my idea was pretty simple, set up Apache 2.x on a different port on the server so I can run them both in parallel until the newer version is tested and everything is working fine, then remove the old version and swap the port over.

All this would work fine, except that along with masking the Apache 1.x core package, all the dependencies were modified as not to have to build for Apache 1.x. So for me I didn’t have Apache 2.x installed when I setup PHP originally, so it doesn’t have the Apache 2 module built, and I can’t just rebuild PHP with Apache 2 support because that’ll lose it the Apache 1.x support, as the current PHP package has Apache 1.x support removed.

Bah.

I found a possible solution in the forums which pointed me to downloading an older PHP version from CVS sources and installing it. Just a matter of wondering if it’ll break anything unexpected. Also if I want to do any system maintenance like this at 11pm with a bit of (lovely and smooth) tequila in me 🙂 Answer is probably no, I’ll do it tomorrow sometime, or on the weekend.

I guess I can’t bitch too much at the distro, they announced this change weeks ago, long enough for me to have setup and installed Apache 2 and had it all tested and swapped over long before 1.x was gone. However, it’d be nice to leave some of the dependencies around a bit longer… course, it really isn’t the best OS for a stable server I’m (still) finding out… way to cutting edge and keeping on the cutting edge.