Well, after spending absolutely aaaages trying to make PEAR work and
failing, I finally bit the bullet and rewrote LibStats to use PDO
instead. It took 15 solid hours last Saturday, but it's been working
smoothly all week.
Hopefully that will prevent a recurrence of similar problems for some
time. Since PDO is a native PHP interface, I suspect it's here for the
long haul.
I'd be happy to contribute this back to the community, but I don't know
where to send it. The original code repository on code.google.com
resembles a ghost town, complete with tumbleweeds, creaky half-hung
doors, and a mournful wind whistling through the desolate ruins of a
once vibrant project.
I did find a fork on GitHub, but it too hasn't been updated in 4 years.
I could just publish my own fork on github, but I worry that it would
soon join the other abandoned versions littering the digital landscape,
because I honestly don't have a whole lot of time to devote to
maintaining it.
Not that it needs much maintenance. It does what it does pretty well.
It's got a few warts, notably the completely unhelpful white screen of
death if you misspell your password. But aside from the PEAR issue,
there's nothing I can see that's so critical that it really needs
addressing.
Will Martin
On 2016-08-25 14:34, Demian Katz wrote:
It's possible that the problem is that updating PHP also updated
PEAR::DB, and it bumped up to a version that doesn't get along with
LibStats. Do you happen to have any record of the PEAR versions that
were running on your server before the upgrade so that you can compare
them against current versions? It might be possible to simply
downgrade the dependency to restore previous functionality (though of
course you then run the risk of running into some other
incompatibility between an old version of the library and PHP 7...
it's never easy!).
For what it's worth, users running very old versions of VuFind (from
before it switched from PEAR::DB_DataObject to Zend\Db as its
abstraction layer) occasionally complain about breaks after upgrading
PHP, and the solution usually turns out to be "downgrade to a specific
old version of PEAR::DB_DataObject." I'm not sure if this also applies
to plain old PEAR::DB, but it's worth investigating if you have the
option.
Good luck!
- Demian
-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of
Will Martin
Sent: Thursday, August 25, 2016 12:52 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [CODE4LIB] LibStats, PEAR, PHP 7
All,
A recent server upgrade seems to have broken our installation of
LibStats. It appears that the database abstraction layer it uses,
PEAR::DB, is not working correctly. Once instantiated, it's supposed
to have methods like getOne() and getAll() that execute a SQL query
and retrieve the results; but keeps complaining that these are
undefined.
I'm pretty sure this has something to do with the fact that the upgrade
-- to Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS -- installed PHP 7, up from 5.6. According
to the PEAR web site, PEAR::DB is supposed to be compatible with PHP 7
despite being ancient and crufty, but it's not working.
Anyone have any insight on how to get PEAR::DB to play nice in its new
environment? Because the other option would be going in and rewriting
all the database queries to use a more modern database abstraction
layer. Probably PDO. That's certainly doable, but it'd be quite a
pretty fair chunk of work, and in the meantime our reference and
access services staff can't log their stats normally.
Will Martin
