Hey everyone, I'm running debian stable, but need to upgrade php past the stable version. I'm concerned that doing so will lead to some problems with incompatibilities and such. It appears that I need to install quite a few packages for this to work, just look at:

#apt-get install php4/testing
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Selected version 4:4.3.4-4 (Debian:testing) for php4
The following extra packages will be installed:
apache apache-common apache-utils autoconf binutils console-common debconf debconf-i18n file libc6 libc6-dev
libdb1-compat libdb4.2 libexpat1 libgdbm3 libkeynote0 liblocale-gettext-perl libmagic1 libmm13 libnewt0.51
libpam0g libpcre3 libpcre3-dev libpopt0 libssl0.9.7 libtext-charwidth-perl libtext-iconv-perl
libtext-wrapi18n-perl linux-kernel-headers locales modutils perl perl-base perl-modules php4 sed slang1a-utf8
ucf whiptail zlib1g
The following packages will be REMOVED:
autoconf2.13 libnss-db
The following NEW packages will be installed:
apache-utils debconf-i18n libdb1-compat libdb4.2 libgdbm3 libkeynote0 liblocale-gettext-perl libmagic1 libmm13
libnewt0.51 libssl0.9.7 libtext-charwidth-perl libtext-iconv-perl libtext-wrapi18n-perl linux-kernel-headers
slang1a-utf8 ucf
23 packages upgraded, 17 newly installed, 2 to remove and 166 not upgraded.
Need to get 29.8MB of archives. After unpacking 35.4MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

Is this going to affect anything else on the system. It's sole purpose is to be a router/web server, so it's not like I'm using many programs.

Also, as soon as I add testing entries to my sources.list, if I do an apt-get update and then upgrade, it lists a whole bunch of packages to download. Does it understand that I'm running a stable distribution? Are all of these testing? If I change back my sources.list, and do a "apt-get update", it no longer wants me to download all of these.

Either way, any suggestions are welcome, thanks!

Use a package built for Woody.

http://www1.apt-get.org/search.php?q...arch%5B%5D=all

Wow! Thank you so much. Added them as a source, did an apt-get install php4, voila. I had never heard of dotdeb.org, apparently I'm not the only person who needs this

Now, if anyone can explain the mess of requirements for php4/testing I'd love to hear it.

Your welcome. Woody was released before PHP4 came out and it requires libraries/programs that are newer that what are in Woody. So when you tried to install the version from testing apt was trying to pull in the dependencies to satisfy this requirement. Now at the www.apt-get.org site I linked too they have what are called backports of packages. These are packages changed to allow compiling using the packages/libraries that are already present in Woody so they will install properly without having to upgrade your entire system.