Comment 4 for bug 809400

Sorry for being rude, but as you might imagine this whole situation was frustrating, and it was not the first time some little thing about Ubuntu LTS caused me much main and suffering. Not as much as RedHat but that's another story. Getting logged in and posting was even more frustrating as the site intentionally makes it hard to post bug reports to keep out the stupid people I guess, and it's even harder when under maintenance as it was at the time. I can see how one might get tired of frustrated users, but then again that is almost entirely who comes here.

You may call needing to run PHP 5.2.X with the PHP version of the GD library on a recent server distro not "sane", but I wouldn't call a server distribution that does not offer an option for PHP 5.2.X with its included GD library as an option particularly "sane" either. I guess we server admins think you OS developers are insane, and you OS developers think we server admins are insane. I can only imagine then what the customers think of us then when we tell them they need to pay over $20,000 to port all their legacy code to PHP 5.3.X if they want a server OS that is still eligible for security updates.

Anyways, what I am trying to say is unless someone in this situation such as myself is willing to do something that is apparently not "sane", they cannot run their PHP code on Ubuntu LTS distributions, and this is all because two mildly related dev packages incorrectly claim that they depend on their corresponding non-dev packages. I hear this was solved in PHP 5.3.X as there is a seperate version of PHP and/or GD library that uses PHP's version of the GD library, but again, 5.3.X is not an option here.

I read online about installing 5.2.X on Lucid, and heard that you can just mess with /etc/apt/sources.list to let you install PHP 5.2.X from Karmic onto Lucid, then lock those packages to the Karmic versions so that they do not update to the Lucid versions, and you're good to go. Unfortunately, PHP made their own GD library version and you guys did not want to use it due to security concerns, so instead I used a Karmic source package, made it use PHP's GD library instead of the Ubuntu system version, and tried to compile that as a solution, whereupon I ran into the previously mentioned dependency issues.

If you know of a better AND simpler way for the thousands of server admins like me who need to install the PHP 5.2.X and PHP GD library on Lucid, PLEASE let us know as it would benefit us all. I know you do not want people posting bug reports about this stuff, and we don't want to have to bang our heads on the desk this many times to just get it to work.

I realize this will all probably either fall on deaf ears, or be too long to read and ignored, and so not fixed. That's okay however, my main concern is that people doing Google searches about this same issue might find this bug report and thus learn how to solve the problem.