Iconv issues

[Jim Ohlstein]

Hello,

After upgrading a test box successfully to 10-PRERELEASE (r259093) I did 
the same on another and ran into major iconv problems.

To make a long story short, a PHP script stopped working with the 
following error:

2013/12/10 03:01:52 [error] 3356#0: *10897 FastCGI sent in stderr: "PHP 
message: PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function iconv_strlen() in 
/path/to/script.php on line 420" while reading response header from 
upstream, client: [ip deleted] server: [my server], request: "GET 
/script.php?21,19203,19203 HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://127.0.0.1:9000"

For some reason, the PHP "iconv_strlen()" function is not working 
correctly. I'm not sure if this is a known issue, but since it works as 
expected under 9.2 with the libiconv port installed, I am guessing it's 
not an issue with PHP. This was fatal no matter which PHP implementation 
I used (PHP-PPM 5.5.5 or Apache 2.2 with libphp5.so). For whatever 
reason, the function call does not seem to work with the base iconv 
implementation in 10-STABLE.

I reverted to 9.2 with a zfs rollback and all is well.

So here's the question:

Can I continue to compile against libiconv even though the port is 
deprecated? Well I know that I can but is it ill advised? I'm not 
concerned about the license issue in this situation.

Also, has anyone else seen this or developed a workaround beside 
continuing to use libiconv?


-- 
Jim Ohlstein