Lukas Smith wrote:
I think that eZ is an example of a company that shows its willing to
take a risk in betting their money on PHP6 only, because they are
producing a product that will then simply be on a cleaner basis for its
customers. Other companies in much more controlled environments would be
able to take a step like this much more easily. I know I would much more
happily embrace a cleaned up PHP6 compared to a somewhat BC PHP5.
Correct, if you are a company and you have some control over the
installed PHP version then the problem isn't that big. But it doesn't
work that way for the open source projects out there and the millions of
people that are using PHP on a shared hosting server. We just recently
decided to drop PHP 4.2 support, doing that sooner would increase the
support load for our project quite a bit. We rather spend that time on
improving the product/project. If you have a (popular/mainstream)
open-source project you have to make sure that your software runs on
just about anything. safe_mode on/off, zend.ze1_compatibility_mode
on/off, version 4.3, 5.1, register_globals, wacky mangling of hostnames,
weird problems with header(), etc, etc. If you don't work around all
those bugs you'll have to answer a LOT of complaints from a lot of users
(that don't have control over their hosting environment).
Again; breaking compatibility is a necessary evil. I really don't mind
when this happens if it is with ample warning and if it makes sense. Not
being allowed to nest some simple array/string functions doesn't make
sense. PHP4 code is going to be around for quite some time, I still run
into users trying to use code that requires register_globals :\ Please
keep in mind that the world out there isn't going to install the latest
and coolest PHP release just because it's cool. Most companies run a PHP
release because it's tried, tested, stable and compatible with what the
customers want to run. I know that sucks, there are quite a few things
that we would like to do different too but we can't because we have to
stay compatible with PHP 4.x. Same with browser support. We could do
really cool stuff if everyone was on Firefox 1.5 but that's just not the
way it is and that's not how it's going to be in the next few years.
Bart
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