Hi,

I have many Firebird databases on my Gentoo server.

To compile PHP with Firebird support, I have the line

-firebird

in /etc/portage/profile/use.mask because the Firebird USE flag
of PHP was masked somewhen.

This worked without problems as long as Firebird (3.0) was in
the portage tree.

Now Firebird was completely removed from the portage tree.
So I installed Firebird (5.0) from its own homepage which
works without problems, too. I put the line

dev-db/firebird-5.0.1.1469

into /etc/portage/profile/package.provided. Not sure if this
was necessary, but apparently it doesn't harm...

...maybe except one point: Since then, revdep-rebuild always
reinstalls PHP (although it doesn't show any orphaned files).

The other/old revdep-rebuild.sh says, however,
"Dynamic linking on your system is consistent... All done."

I'd like to get the normal revdep-rebuild saying "everything
ok", too. So what's the correct way to deal with a manually
installed Firebird server while keeping the Firebird support
in PHP and not interfering with revdep-rebuild?

Thanks,

-Matt

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On Monday 10 February 2025 19:07:07 Greenwich Mean Time Matthias Hanft wrote:

Hi,

I have many Firebird databases on my Gentoo server.

To compile PHP with Firebird support, I have the line

-firebird

in /etc/portage/profile/use.mask because the Firebird USE flag
of PHP was masked somewhen.

This worked without problems as long as Firebird (3.0) was in
the portage tree.

Now Firebird was completely removed from the portage tree.
So I installed Firebird (5.0) from its own homepage which
works without problems, too. I put the line

dev-db/firebird-5.0.1.1469

into /etc/portage/profile/package.provided. Not sure if this
was necessary, but apparently it doesn't harm...

...maybe except one point: Since then, revdep-rebuild always
reinstalls PHP (although it doesn't show any orphaned files).

The other/old revdep-rebuild.sh says, however,
"Dynamic linking on your system is consistent... All done."

I'd like to get the normal revdep-rebuild saying "everything
ok", too. So what's the correct way to deal with a manually
installed Firebird server while keeping the Firebird support
in PHP and not interfering with revdep-rebuild?

Thanks,

-Matt

According to http://gpo.zugaina.org/ firebird is provided by bgo-overlay. I don't know if this overlay is checked by gentoo devs for the quality of its contents or not, but you could take a look. Using an overlay will allow your system to know what files were installed by emerge. I expect your 'revdep- rebuild' behaviour will correct itself thereafter.

If the above overlay is not good, then you can create your own local overlay for this purpose.
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On Tuesday 11 February 2025 09:09:55 Greenwich Mean Time Matthias Hanft wrote:

Michael wrote:

According to http://gpo.zugaina.org/ firebird is provided by bgo-overlay.
I don't know if this overlay is checked by gentoo devs for the quality of its contents or not, but you could take a look. Using an overlay will allow your system to know what files were installed by emerge. I expect your 'revdep- rebuild' behaviour will correct itself thereafter.

Thanks for the hint, but according to http://gpo.zugaina.org/Overlays/bgo-overlay/dev-db/firebird there's just version 4.0 available; as I already installed version 5.0 from https://www.firebirdsql.org/en/firebird-5-0#linux-x64 I don't want to downgrade.

I guess I could put some kind of "exceptions" into /etc/revdep-rebuild, but
I don't know what to configure in LD_LIBRARY_MASK and/or SEARCH_DIRS_MASK
as revdep-rebuild doesn't show any files and/or directories - it just reinstalls PHP...

-Matt

Well, without knowing much at all about firebird, I understand it has a PHP extension. I would think this sets up some reverse dependency symlinks, which revdep-rebuild finds by scanning /lib* directories and then wants to (re)install PHP. Other than spending time rebuilding PHP, in itself it won't cause harm to your system.

Did you try running revdep-rebuild with the --debug --verbose --pretend
options to see if it reveals the specific library objects affected?

Either way, since you probably intend to continue using firebird I suggest you consider if it is feasible to set up a local overlay to experiment with it.
You could copy the ebuild for version 4.0 from the bgo-overlay, or the last firebird from portage attic and tweak it to make it compile and install on
your system.

https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/log/?qt=grep&q=firebird

Firebird was dropped from portage recently due to a lack of maintainer. I appreciate it doesn't have the simplest of ebuilds, but if you become proficient in looking after your own ebuild, potentially with some advice from Gentoo devs, you could contribute your work for Firebird to return back to portage.
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Michael wrote:

According to http://gpo.zugaina.org/ firebird is provided by bgo-overlay. I don't know if this overlay is checked by gentoo devs for the quality of its contents or not, but you could take a look. Using an overlay will allow your system to know what files were installed by emerge. I expect your 'revdep- rebuild' behaviour will correct itself thereafter.

Thanks for the hint, but according to http://gpo.zugaina.org/Overlays/bgo-overlay/dev-db/firebird
there's just version 4.0 available; as I already installed version 5.0 from https://www.firebirdsql.org/en/firebird-5-0#linux-x64 I don't want to downgrade.

I guess I could put some kind of "exceptions" into /etc/revdep-rebuild, but
I don't know what to configure in LD_LIBRARY_MASK and/or SEARCH_DIRS_MASK
as revdep-rebuild doesn't show any files and/or directories - it just reinstalls PHP...

-Matt

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Michael wrote:

Did you try running revdep-rebuild with the --debug --verbose --pretend options to see if it reveals the specific library objects affected?

Good idea:

[...]
* Checking dynamic linking consistency
analyse(), Searching for 15578 libs, bins within 17138 libraries and links
LibCheck.__init__(), new searchlibs: ['32', '64']
LibCheck.search(), Checking for broken 32 bit libs
LibCheck.search(), Checking for broken 64 bit libs
LibCheck.search(); FOUND: 64bit, libfbclient.so.2, /usr/lib64/php8.2/apache2/libphp8.so
LibCheck.search(); FOUND: 64bit, libfbclient.so.2, /usr/lib64/php8.2/bin/php
LibCheck.search(); Total found: 1 libs, 2 files in 791 milliseconds
* Broken files that require: libfbclient.so.2 (64 bits)
* /usr/lib64/php8.2/apache2/libphp8.so
* /usr/lib64/php8.2/bin/php
LibCheck.process_results(); total filepaths found: 2 in 1 milliseconds
* Assign files to packages
* /usr/lib64/php8.2/apache2/libphp8.so -> dev-lang/php-8.2.24
* /usr/lib64/php8.2/bin/php -> dev-lang/php-8.2.24
assign_packages(); assigned 1 packages, 0 orphans in 6469 milliseconds

As I understand it, both "libphp8.so" and "php" itself need "libfbclient.so.2". But that does exist:

home01 /usr/lib64 # ls -l libfb*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 32 Feb 9 11:11 libfbclient.so -> /opt/firebird/lib/libfbclient.so
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 34 Feb 9 11:11 libfbclient.so.2 -> /opt/firebird/lib/libfbclient.so.2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 38 Feb 9 11:11 libfbclient.so.5.0.1 -> /opt/firebird/lib/libfbclient.so.5.0.1

home01 /usr/lib64 # ls -l /opt/firebird/lib
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 Aug 2 2024 libfbclient.so -> libfbclient.so.2 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Aug 2 2024 libfbclient.so.2 -> libfbclient.so.5.0.1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2973336 Aug 2 2024 libfbclient.so.5.0.1

So, after re-emerging PHP, everything should be fine?!

home01 /usr/lib64/php8.2/apache2 # ldd libphp8.so | grep libfb
libfbclient.so.2 => /usr/lib64/libfbclient.so.2 (0x00007f434c0d3000)

home01 /usr/lib64/php8.2/bin # ldd php | grep libfb
libfbclient.so.2 => /usr/lib64/libfbclient.so.2 (0x00007fe65f5ac000)

and actually PHP *does* wotk with Firebird.

I guess revdep-rebuild thinks "no portage ebuild contains libfbclient.so.2 which is needed by PHP, so let's just re-install PHP and hope for the best". (Whereas the old "revdep-rebuild.sh" doesn't think so - strange, isn't it?)

I don't know portage (or revdep-rebuild) well enough to be able to say 'libfbclient.so.2 *is* available after all!'.

Either way, since you probably intend to continue using firebird I suggest you
consider if it is feasible to set up a local overlay to experiment with it. You could copy the ebuild for version 4.0 from the bgo-overlay, or the last firebird from portage attic and tweak it to make it compile and install on your system. https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/log/?qt=grep&q=firebird

Hmmm... could be a solution indeed, but as long as it's just revdep-rebuild, the pain threshold for an overlay and tinkering with the ebuild has not yet been reached :-)

Firebird was dropped from portage recently due to a lack of maintainer. I appreciate it doesn't have the simplest of ebuilds, but if you become proficient in looking after your own ebuild, potentially with some advice from
Gentoo devs, you could contribute your work for Firebird to return back to portage.

Unfortunately, I haven't got any clue how to build ebuilds - I'm just writing application software. Regarding standard system software packages like Apache, PHP, Firebird and all that, I'm just a dumb user as everyone else. Sorry!

-Matt

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On 2025-02-11 17:30:00, Matthias Hanft wrote:

Hmmm... could be a solution indeed, but as long as it's just revdep-rebuild, the pain threshold for an overlay and tinkering with the ebuild has not yet been reached :-)

I think you are going to be stuck with revdep-rebuild issues
otherwise. Every installed file is associated with a package, and it's
that association that revdep-rebuild is probing when it decides that
PHP needs to be rebuilt. It thinks the firebird libs have been
upgraded and that PHP was linked to the old version because your
firebird libs aren't associated with any installed package. If that
were the case, rebuilding PHP would link it to the new libs and allow
the old ones to be cleaned up -- but for you it's just going to cause
PHP to be re-linked to the same libs that revdep-rebuild thinks are
orphaned.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Michael Orlitzky wrote:

I think you are going to be stuck with revdep-rebuild issues
otherwise.

I succeeded in creating a file /etc/revdep-rebuild/98-firebird
with the line

LD_LIBRARY_MASK="libfbclient.so.2"

in it. Then, revdep-rebuild says

[...]
* Checking dynamic linking consistency
analyse(), Searching for 15578 libs, bins within 17136 libraries and links
LibCheck.__init__(), new searchlibs: ['32', '64']
LibCheck.search(), Checking for broken 32 bit libs
LibCheck.search(), Checking for broken 64 bit libs
Library libfbclient.so.2 ignored as it is masked
Library libfbclient.so.2 ignored as it is masked
LibCheck.search(); Total found: 0 libs, 0 files in 789 milliseconds
LibCheck.process_results(); total filepaths found: 0 in 0 milliseconds Your system is consistent.

Hooray! :-)

-Matt

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On 2025-02-14 13:47:56, Matthias Hanft wrote:

Michael Orlitzky wrote:

I think you are going to be stuck with revdep-rebuild issues
otherwise.

I succeeded in creating a file /etc/revdep-rebuild/98-firebird
with the line

LD_LIBRARY_MASK="libfbclient.so.2"

in it.

Nice, I didn't know about this.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

I wrote:

To compile PHP with Firebird support, I have the line
-firebird
in /etc/portage/profile/use.mask because the Firebird USE flag
of PHP was masked somewhen.

While working with the manually installed Firebird 5.0 and the
unmasked "firebird" USE flag @ PHP, now here's the next problem:

They removed the "firebird" USE flag from PHP!

Now the PHP script

$x = new PDO('firebird:dbname=...');

leads to

PHP Fatal error: Uncaught PDOException: could not find driver

I already tried the PHP extension "php_8.2.0-interbase-3.0.1-linux-x64.so"
from https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/php-firebird/releases but that leads to

PHP Warning: Module "interbase" is already loaded
PHP Fatal error: Uncaught PDOException: could not find driver

On https://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.pdo-firebird.php it is mentioned

"Use --with-pdo-firebird[=DIR] to install the PDO Firebird extension,
where the optional [=DIR] is the Firebird base install directory."
$ ./configure --with-pdo-firebird

I'd really like to do that, but how?

-Matt

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This is an OpenPGP/MIME signed message (RFC 4880 and 3156) --------------tl1a5RBJFF7xUBZPCzgD40xX
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On 3/23/25 3:34 AM, Matthias Hanft wrote:

I wrote:

To compile PHP with Firebird support, I have the line
-firebird
in /etc/portage/profile/use.mask because the Firebird USE flag
of PHP was masked somewhen.

While working with the manually installed Firebird 5.0 and the
unmasked "firebird" USE flag @ PHP, now here's the next problem:

They removed the "firebird" USE flag from PHP!

Now the PHP script

$x = new PDO('firebird:dbname=...');

leads to

PHP Fatal error: Uncaught PDOException: could not find driver

I already tried the PHP extension "php_8.2.0-interbase-3.0.1-linux-x64.so" from https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/php-firebird/releases but that leads to

PHP Warning: Module "interbase" is already loaded
PHP Fatal error: Uncaught PDOException: could not find driver

On https://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.pdo-firebird.php it is mentioned

"Use --with-pdo-firebird[=DIR] to install the PDO Firebird extension,
where the optional [=DIR] is the Firebird base install directory."
$ ./configure --with-pdo-firebird

I'd really like to do that, but how?

Read the manpage for `man make.conf` and look for references to EXTRA_ECONF.

You will want to do this via package.env, obviously, not
/etc/portage/make.conf itself.



--
Eli Schwartz

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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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Eli Schwartz wrote:

Read the manpage for `man make.conf` and look for references to EXTRA_ECONF. You will want to do this via package.env, obviously, not /etc/portage/make.conf itself.

Thanks for the hint. Asking ChatGPT, I got the complete solution:

1. create the directory /etc/portage/env

2. put a file (with whatever name) there, e.g. simply "php",
with the line
EXTRA_ECONF="--with-pdo-firebird=/opt/firebird"
in it

3. create a file /etc/portage/package.env with the line
dev-lang/php php
(the "php" at the end of the line is just the filename
from the "env" directory)

4. re-install PHP

Seems to work now... thanks again!

-Matt

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