Upgrade to Ubuntu Noble Docker images & Migrate to mysqli_ API

[mrysav]

Ubuntu Noble

This commit has already been merged into master since Ubuntu Focal (20.04) went out of normal support, and was thus dropped from our upstream PHP library PPA.

Unfortunately, due to deprecations in OpenSSL, encryption is broken right now. This includes hybrid mode/cloud backups, until I can patch around that.

I'm not sure anyone uses encrypted backups specifically, because it has been largely unstable (and used unsafe algorithms) for a long time. Unencrypted backups continue to work as before.

mysqli

The mysqli API has been in PHP since version 5. The old mysql API is in fact no longer present in modern PHP versions, so in order to upgrade, we'll need to migrate. Fortunately, most of the uses are behind abstractions, and the migration was very easy.

I've smoke tested the changes on the Docker and Windows builds and they both work, but issues, while not expected, may arise...

mkdocs in a virtual env

Rather than rely on system Python for installing mkdocs, I am now creating a virtual env and linking the mkdocs script in the devcontainer. The end result is the same for users.

Preparing for PHP 7.4

Initial tests show me that BLIS should run on PHP 7.4 just fine after the mysqli upgrade. Unfortunately, Server2Go is using some as-yet-unknown trickery that won't let me upgrade PHP there. I'm working on a fully open source replacement for BLIS.exe but that won't be ready for quite a while yet.

[virustotalop]

Not sure if you have seen this on stackoverflow or if you have and it just doesn't work with newer versions. I looked at your replacement for Server2Go and saw that it is at least somewhat working, not quite sure about the state just off of the commits, so I wasn't sure if this was something you are still interested in but if you are interested into fixing it in the interim I wouldn't mind looking into the issue more.

[mrysav]

@virustotalop hey! Great to hear from you!

I remember reading that, and in fact, I believe I followed it exactly since BLIS uses 5.4.x on Windows, I think. I definitely also at one point tried to get it working with PHP 7+ and remember I did not succeed, although I didn't document my efforts anywhere... I believe the issue was a combination of a) needing to update PHP and Apache 2 at the same time, since the PHP Apache plugin is updating in step with PHP, b) new configuration options being added and they are not in the config.ini.tpl file, c) new start/stop behavior in the binaries that Server2Go does not account for.

If you wanted to try it out, you're welcome to, but I had started writing an open source replacement because in the ~medium term I want to introduce more features to the executable, like updating BLIS automatically. Actually what I wrote should work as a drop-in replacement for BLIS.exe already, and I'm planning to draft a test release of BLIS without Server2Go "Soon" ™️

I published a release here: https://github.com/C4G/BLIS-NG/releases/tag/v0.0.1

You can try it out by either dropping into an existing BLIS folder and running it, or by doing something like:

1. clone C4G/BLIS
2. download BLISRuntime repository as a zip file and extract it over the C4G/BLIS repo
3. download (or build) BLIS-NG.exe and put it in the BLIS folder
4. run BLIS-NG.exe

I'd like to hear your feedback on the new launcher, if you'd like. My next project is to attempt to string together the pieces to update to PHP 7+ for Windows since (as I wrote above) it's a hard requirement on the Linux/Docker version going forward. Perhaps being able to modify the launcher code will make that easier!