PHP Upgrade Error (PHP 5.3.3 to PHP 5.4.19 on CentOS 6.4)

Question

I'm using CentOS 6.4 and I was following this tutorial in order to upgrade PHP from v 5.3.3 to v 5.4.19 but I got the following error:

Error: php54w-common conflicts with php-common-5.3.3-23.el6_4.i686

. How do I resolve this problem?

[my_profile@localhost gplus-quickstart-php]$ sudo rpm -Uvh http://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el6/latest.rpm                                                           
[sudo] password for my_profile:                                                    
Retrieving http://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el6/latest.rpm                        
warning: /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.S0yqSL: Header V4 DSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID cf4c4ff9: NOKEY                                                                          
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]  
   1:webtatic-release       ########################################### [100%]  
[my_profile@localhost gplus-quickstart-php]$ sudo yum install php54w
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, refresh-packagekit, security      
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile                       
 * base: mirror.netglobalis.net                                  
 * extras: mirror.netglobalis.net                                
 * rpmforge: mirror.nexcess.net                                  
 * updates: mirror.netglobalis.net                               
 * webtatic: us-east.repo.webtatic.com                           
webtatic                                                 | 2.9 kB     00:00     
webtatic/primary_db                                      |  98 kB     00:00
Setting up Install Process
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package php54w.i386 0:5.4.19-1.w6 will be installed
--> Processing Dependency: php54w-common = 5.4.19-1.w6 for package: php54w-5.4.19-1.w6.i386
--> Processing Dependency: php54w-cli = 5.4.19-1.w6 for package: php54w-5.4.19-1.w6.i386
--> Running transaction check
---> Package php54w-cli.i386 0:5.4.19-1.w6 will be installed
---> Package php54w-common.i386 0:5.4.19-1.w6 will be installed
--> Processing Conflict: php54w-common-5.4.19-1.w6.i386 conflicts php-common < 5.4.0
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
Error: php54w-common conflicts with php-common-5.3.3-23.el6_4.i686
 You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
 You could try running: rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest
[my_profile@localhost gplus-quickstart-php]$ ^C
[my_profile@localhost gplus-quickstart-php]$ ^C
[my_profile@localhost gplus-quickstart-php]$ Error: php54w-common conflicts with php-common-5.3.3-23.el6_4.i686
bash: Error:: command not found
[my_profile@localhost gplus-quickstart-php]$

Answer 1

The tutorial you cited does recommend using this Webtatic repo on a fresh system, where you can avoid conflicts with installed packages, but suggests that you can upgrade a currently-installed php using (as root or with sudo):

yum install yum-plugin-replace
yum replace php-common --replace-with=php54w-common

Then try sudo yum install php54w again.

Answer 2

As an aside, you should probably check with the vendor demanding you update to an out-of-band package, to confirm what feature absolutely requires this distro change for PHP.

Usually, fixes and (few) features are back-ported to the established, certified release version. Some vendors mistakenly believe '5.4 is more than 5.3 so it must be better and shinier' and often that's a really risky thing to believe. When you swap out a carefully-maintained version with automatic, trivial updates which are tested against the OS by a team of more than a dozen dedicated experts, with one that's been rolled once by 'some guy' and then dropped onto a fileserver for the world to test FOR HIM, you're paying a little more in downtime, errors, security bugs that'll never be fixed in that release and inconsistencies than you'll ever get by having This Week's Release.

Be careful. In asking our vendor recently, it was determined that they didn't even know the difference between this repo and EPEL -- which I promise are two very different things.