I have recently been put in charge of keeping an eye on the servers (we don't have a server admin) and I just realized that we are running a pretty old version of php which has multiple vulnerabilities according to http://lwn.net/Alerts/609952/. I would like to update to the latest stable version but I'm not sure if there's anything else I should do besides these 2 commands:
emerge --sync
emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose "=dev-lang/php-5.5.17
Do I have to recompile php? is there any other step to get it working with apache?
I would really appreciate some help as I'm not very familiar with Gentoo.
To update php I would not use --oneshot as it should be in the world file for when you update your system. If you are worried about security updates you should update your whole system after a sync.
# emerge --update --deep --newuse @world
# emerge --depclean
# revdep-rebuild
Look into the portage introduction. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=2&chap=1