Removing old packages (e.g. PHP 7.3) after upgrade to YNH 11

[chmeyer]

Hello there,

usually I want to run a secure OS, so I care about updates and new versions and deleting ‘old stuff’.
I recently updated my Server from Yunohost 4 to Yunohost 11 following the official migration guide and everything works fine (now).

Since I changed some PHP config files earlier, I’m now found that there are config files for different PHP Versions. Here are some of them:

# ls /etc/php/*/fpm/pool.d/
/etc/php/7.3/fpm/pool.d/:
grav.conf	nextcloud.conf  opensondage.conf [...]

/etc/php/7.4/fpm/pool.d/:
grav.conf  nextcloud.conf opensondage.conf [...]

PHP 7.3 no longer is supported in Debian 11, so I tried to remove it manually:

# apt purge php7.3
but the I got this answer:

The following packages will be REMOVED:
  grav-ynh-deps* nextcloud-ynh-deps* opensondage-ynh-deps*

I now found that there are some manifest.json - files in /etc/yunohost/apps/ (e.g. opensondage, fluxbb, nextcloud) that needs PHP 7.3 as a service and that PHP 7.3 is installed via https://packages.sury.org/php.

So my question is:

• is it safe to change configfiles and then purge php7.3? (probably not),
• will backup - uninstall - reinstall - restore solve my issue?, or
• is this as Yunohost is supposed to be (and I’ll just have to wait for the app-updates)?

Thanks a lot
Christian

[Aleks]

@chmeyer

The following packages will be REMOVED:
  grav-ynh-deps* nextcloud-ynh-deps* opensondage-ynh-deps*

You should force-upgrade grav, nextcloud and opensondage. That way the corresponding virtual packages will also be upgraded to php7.4 (there’s a small inconsistency in our process because your grav/nextcloud/opensondage are already tweaked to use php7.4 even though the virtual packages still point to 7.3 …)

After this, removing/purging php7.3 should work

[chmeyer]

Thank you!

yunohost app upgrade -F APP
was the solution and it’s all fine now.

I don’t know, why I didn’t try that before as this is what is part of
the migration guide.

My explanation for not thinking of this is, that

1. I did the “pending migration” in “Webadmin > Update” and that
2. I really read the app-list in the guide, but since my apps
   has not been part of it I skipped this step.

So sorry for that and thanks for your hint.

Christian

[Aleks]

Yeah I mean it’s also related to the fact that you explicitly want to remove the php7.3 packages Which imho isnt such a big deal to keep, as anyway they’re not used and the php7.3 daemon is supposed to be disabled

The expectation is that people will one way or another end up upgrading their app when new versions of these apps are released, and that’ll square the virtual apt dependencies etc.

We may work on a consistent magic php upgrade/migration for next Debian (Bookworm), maybe with the help of the next-generation packaging format