PHP Wants to Be My Kernel

Thursday, October 20, 2005, at 09:25AM

By Eric Richardson

I love Debian, but there are aspects of the package management system that I don't understand. For instance, I'm trying to install the newest php4 in stable so that I can try to get mod_php working again. Simple enough, but apt-get is convinced it wants to delete my kernel:

[eWorld (eric@bit)-([Thu October 20 12:20pm])]
~: sudo apt-get install php4
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  libapache2-mod-php4 php4-cgi php4-cli php4-common php4-mysql
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  initrd-tools kernel-image-2.4.26-1-386 kernel-image-2.4.27-2-686
<snip>
7 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 3 to remove and 323 not upgraded.
Need to get 6633kB of archives.
After unpacking 62.0MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

I understand that 2.4 is old, but a) you would think php wouldn't care and b) you would like to think it would suggest installing a new kernel at the same time.

I really don't want it to touch that.