This post is very old and likely contains information that is no longer accurate and links which no longer work. Proceed with caution.
- EDIT:
- PHP 5.2.9 is out for FreeBSD, so this may be fixed.
There seems to be a bug in the way PHP’s xml library handles data when compiled
against libxml 2.7.x. Supposedly, this will be fixed in the next release of
PHP, but for now you have to back down to libxml 2.6.x, or compile against
expat instead of libxml.
I first noticed this with a Joomla installation, a component was erroring out,
saying Fatal error: Call to a member function getTagName() on a non-object.
Investigating this led me to this bug entry for PHP
I then found another server of mine with problems, this one was using XMLRPC and
was getting back responses stripped of the < and > characters, rendering
returned HTML code quite broken.
For those of you on FreeBSD who have no idea how to downgrade to the earlier version, it’s actually pretty simple, it can be done like so:
# cd /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portdowngrade/
# make DEFAULT_CVS_SERVER="anoncvs@anoncvs1.FreeBSD.org:/home/ncvs" install clean
# portdowngrade libxml2
When presented with the choice, choose textproc/libxml2 (Probably option #2).
It will then start listing all prior version of the libxml2 port. When you see
version 2.6.32, press enter. Use the most recent copy of 2.6.32, for me it was
timestamped 2008/11/19 19:23:07.
Press the number (probably 3) at the start of the line for the version you want, and let portdowngrade do its thing. As suggested by the output of portdowngrade, finish up like so:
# portsdb -Uu
# portupgrade -f libxml2
# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache22 restart
Be aware that the portsdb -Uu run can take a while on older systems. Also, you
may substitute that last line with whatever command you typically use to restart
apache (shutdown and start again, not a graceful restart)
Danger Will Robinson! Note that if you update your ports tree it will bring
libxml2 back to the most recent version, be careful not to upgrade it again
until after the next release of PHP!