Ubuntu – PHP 5.4 interactive mode on Ubuntu 12.04

PHPppa

I'm a big fan of PHP interactive mode (php -a). Today I decided to install PHP 5.4 to play around a little bit. It's fun to use the new built-in server and all that stuff, but I was very sad when I discovered that the interactive mode doesn't work.

I installed PHP 5.4 on my Ubuntu by adding the PPA:

add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php5
apt-get update
apt-get install php5

And this is what I get when I run php -a:

$ php -a
Interactive mode enabled

Aaaaand nothing more. As far as I know this PPA follows the newest PHP5 maintained by Debian PKG PHP Team and as far as I know the interactive mode is also usually broken on freshly installed Debians.

Any ideas on how to get it back? Preferably using some other PPA or at least without compiling – that's usually less painful.

Best Answer

My PPA (ppa:ondrej/php5) was created as an exact copy of Debian php5 source package. There was a problem that Debian's libedit didn't include the required patch for interactive mode (at least I thought so, because the bug on libedit wasn't closed). I have just found that this issue has been already solved in libedit (2.11-20080614-4), but the bug wasn't properly closed.

Anyway the good news is that since this bug in libedit has been already solved in Debian, I will be rebuilding php5 with libedit and it will be included from php5 >= 5.4.12-2(~dist+1).

[Edit]: Also there's now php5-readline module, thanks to Andreas Pour, who poked me that it can be built and packaged now.

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