Hey,

Will have a look what we can do with this one fixed and whether there is a short term solution to get snapshots available again.

Not sure if it helps but the branches at https://github.com/php/php-src are the releases (4.x, 5.x) and master is currently the development on PHP 7.

Regards,
Jacob.

It is also quite easy to build it yourself, especially if you grab my vagrant image. See https://github.com/rlerdorf/php7dev

That comes with every version of PHP pre-compiled and to build the latest php7:

cd php-src
git pull -r
make distclean
./buildconf -f
./cn
sudo make install
sudo newphp 7 debug (assuming you did a debug build - see the instructions on switching the currently active php build)

All the dependencies and everything you need are already there.

Thanks for the suggestions so far.

I've fiddled with this information, and tried it on Travis CI: https://travis-ci.org/BanzaiMan/travis_production_test/jobs/50634414#L1191

While it seems to work (as far as compilation goes; this doesn't include other modules or phpunit we offer in other PHP versions), but it adds significant amount of time (10+ minutes). It would be great if a precompiled binary package of reasonably recent development version existed.

> While it seems to work (as far as compilation goes; this doesn't include other
> modules or phpunit we offer in other PHP versions), but it adds significant
> amount of time (10+ minutes).

This is definitely less than ideal as this could quickly blow out to a long
build if you need to be doing this for multiple versions of PHP.

> It would be great if a precompiled binary package of reasonably recent
> development version existed.

There are precompiled versions out in the wild however they vary from
distribution to distribution and having a single source for this would be a huge
maintainance task.

After some discussions it would appear the reasoning behind removing
http://snaps.php.net was because there are better alternatives available and it
isn't worth the maintenance involved in keeping it running.

I've also discovered that http://php.net/releases contains historical releases
(don't think this solves any issues though - it's more of a heads up).

I'm not sure where to go from here with this as it doesn't look like
http://snaps.php.net will be coming back and we haven't got any closer to a
solution. 

What do you think?

Hi, Jacob,

Thanks for looking into it. Our needs are limited; at the moment, we only need an archive for Ubuntu Precise (also on Trusty in the near future) on x86_64. (And I don't see this expanding much before PHP 7 is released.)

Since php/php-src is building on Travis CI already, one thing we can try is to upload the resulting archive to a place where Travis (and perhaps some brave souls among your user base) can download subsequently.

One can deploy via S3 (http://docs.travis-ci.com/user/deployment/s3/), Google Cloud Storage (http://docs.travis-ci.com/user/deployment/gcs/), or a custom "after_success" section (http://docs.travis-ci.com/user/deployment/custom/). One can also use artifacts (http://docs.travis-ci.com/user/uploading-artifacts/) to upload to S3.

Do you have a place suitable for such storage? The upload setup is easy, and I'm willing to work on a PR. The hard part is to find a place for it.

(I changed the PHP version inadvertently)

> Thanks for looking into it. Our needs are limited; at the moment, we only need
> an archive for Ubuntu Precise (also on Trusty in the near future) on x86_64.
> (And I don't see this expanding much before PHP 7 is released.)

Could you use the 5.4[1] and 5.5[2] PPA's for Precise (and down the track
Trusty)? Or would you only be interested in the source? If you use apt-get, you
could look at using an apt cacher to only download it once but serve to multiple
builds and save bandwidth.

> Since php/php-src is building on Travis CI already, one thing we can try is to
> upload the resulting archive to a place where Travis (and perhaps some brave
> souls among your user base) can download subsequently.

Sure! Let me shoot out an email to the internals and see whether it's something
everyone can see some benefit in adding. In doing this, we may also get some
insight for your next point.

> Do you have a place suitable for such storage?

I am not sure on as most mirrors for PHP are sponsored so I would need to
investigate what is involved in getting this setup. Do you know what sort of
bandwidth this would consume?

[1]: https://launchpad.net/~ondrej/+archive/ubuntu/php5-oldstable 
[2]: https://launchpad.net/~ondrej/+archive/ubuntu/php5

Hi, Jacob,

We compile all other versions with php-build at image provisioning time, so we are all set for those.

The bandwidth requirement is a bit hard to estimate; it depends on how popular "php 7 nightly" is going to be.

Currently, on .org (for public repositories) we run about 10000 PHP builds over the course of a calendar month. Of these, I believe about 25% include builds with 5.6, which seems a good upper bound for what we can expect to have for the "php 7 nightly". We run slightly fewer PHP builds on .com, but I suspect that demands for the bleeding edge versions are a lot less (almost negligible, even) there.

The archive is about 18MB, That adds up to about 450 GB of bandwidth in a month. Let's say 500 GB to overestimate the cost. Do note that about 1/3 of the builds mentioned above seem to be running on the new container builds on EC2, so if we put stuff on S3, we'll save some bandwidth.

Hey,
Apologies on the delay in getting back to you on this - I've had a tough time
trying to get all of the right people online at the same time! Thanks for those
usage stats, they came in handy.

I haven't been able to get a definite answer on the uploading the php/php-src
build artifact to another source for download and from the feedback I received,
it wasn't something people were interested in using (for the development team
anyway). Outside of the internals team, the nightly build probably isn't
something we would be encouraging people to use as it's sometimes quite
unstable and prone to breakage.

I would still like to probe further into this one as I can see benefit however
I'm not sure when, if ever, this would be implemented so I would rather not
leave this ticket lingering. Are you ok for me to close this one off? Or do you
have further questions? 

NB: The references to http://snaps.php.net have been removed from across the PHP
site to eliminate any further confusion.

Hi, Jacob,

Thanks for checking. I appreciate the effort you expended on our behalf. I also understand that the dev team decided not to pursue it.

I think we can host the archives for our use, and see how it goes.

You can close this ticket now.

Thanks again!

Hey,

Thanks for your understanding here - I know it's not always ideal to push this
sort of thing back to the end user services.

> I think we can host the archives for our use, and see how it goes.

Would love to know what you guys end up with! Let me know how you progress and
if you need any assistance, I would be happy to set some time aside for it.

Hi, Jacob,

We ended up hosting the nightly build archive on our S3 bucket. (And announced it to the world earlier today.) We'll see how much bandwidth we consume.

https://twitter.com/travisci/status/570616566171242497
http://docs.travis-ci.com/user/languages/php/#PHP-nightly-builds

@hiro

Do you have some time to chat about that?

We have something very similar in place using some of the most popular apps and frameworks as test bases. It is used as part of our QA efforts, almost for all commits and for the RC phase of each release.

It would be even more useful if we can get them run on travis as well along this php7 effort. I can imagine to increase the apps or cases and make them public, reducing the duplication of efforts, resources, etc. to test these usual suspects against latest php7-dev.