Lukas Smith wrote:
See my note above. Everybody knows that clean ups will cause BC breaks
and everybody knows that designing code that never breaks BC is a futile
attempt that simply takes to long to be of any use out in the real
world. We just have to communicate more clearly when we do break BC and
we have to focus on reducing the number of BC breaking releases to a
minimum instead of breaking little things in every release.
The 'communicate more clearly' part is what this (IMO) all boils down
to. As I said, I understand that BC breaks are sometimes needed, no
problem with that. The problem lies in the fact that we now all of the
sudden have lots of applications stopping with a fatal error because of
this '$ref =& $this' thing. That's just BAD. Give people time to create
workarounds for this (if the break is really needed) and make sure that
it's possible to keep your code working on all PHP versions that are
currently in use. There are quite a few workarounds for BC breaks in
phpBB, that's annoying but not a big problem as long as we're all given
time to implement those workarounds and as long as people get the
opportunity to upgrade to some new versions of the PHP software. That's
all :)
Try to prevent breaking BC in a rude way and communicate _clearly_ why
those changes are needed and why they can't be resolved in another way.
This could prevent things like this:
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=299596
or:
http://phplens.com/phpeverywhere/?q=node/view/214
"However the PHP engine developers have done an extremely bad job in
explaining why many things that worked in earlier versions of PHP now
breaks, or why we are now getting "Fatal error/Warning: Only variables
can be passed by reference..." messages."
which are just bad for the community as a whole.
Bart
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