Lester Caine wrote: > Andi Gutmans wrote: >> I see no value in making compatibility breaks in 5.x and not in the next >> major version. As it is we drive a lot of our users crazy. We already >> agreed this is a 6.x thing. >>> IMHO one good reason to start a new branch for 5.x would be the >>> ability to get rid off register_globals and magic_quotes in the 5 >>> series without having to wait for PHP6 to come around. > > It seems to me that there are even more people around with their own > agendas today.
I don't think there are that many agendas, just more constituents of each. * admins who don't want binary compatibility breaks on subversion bumps, lest they start rebuilding all sorts of things beyond php itself. * admins and users who are sick of having things that 'just worked' broken even at a subversion bump, and who don't want to see anything deprecated until PHP6. * security folk who want frequently-abused features deprecated yesterday. * users who want the bleeding edge new toys and features. and -most importantly- * developers who want to implement new toys and push them out there to the admin and user communities tomorrow. Pride of authorship, usefulness, encouraging the health of the community, and all that. * developers who want to constrain growth so that the users have a more stable platform to use and they can follow all of the changes. They are most important because PHP -is- its developers. The only question, how to reconcile this most critical constituency with the other communities, such that all of the communities are mostly-happy. This probably only works if things don't get broken between 5.2.2 and 5.2.3, only absolutely manditory breakage occurs from 5.2 to 5.3, some wiggle room for cool new things is left open in 5.2.3 and 5.3, and finally that some of the more 'international' devs, users and admins work focus together on a 6.0 end-result, since they are the ones who needed the unicode implementation about five years ago. These are the same battles we all face at many projects (I'm hidden over at httpd, apr, etc etc) and the conclusion is usually the same. Pick a versioning policy, stick to it, and otherwise don't get in the way of dev's enthusiasm. [If any users/admins are insulted, mea culpa. Consider that there would be no PHP for you to use/admin without your dedicated developers. It's open source - if it broke, you still have both halves.] -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
