On Sat, 2010-11-27 at 03:50 -0800, Karoly Negyesi wrote: > tl;dr the PHP developers have a false belief in not breaking backwards > compatibility in minor releases.
Besides from what Pierre said: There is a difference between the language and the function library. The change in the language from PHP 3 to PHP 4 was big - even trivial things like "include" and "require" hanged their behavior. From PHP 4 to PHP 5 the whole object model changed. PHP 6 once was supposed to change the whole type system by introducing a new default string type. These are the kinds of changes demanding the version change as they affect each and every user and demanding big changes to applications. Yes even with minor releases we do allow language changes which have some BC impact but that's quite manageable and should allow a quick migration path (5.3 introduced "goto" and "namespace" as keyword which broke applications using them, the next version will introduce a keyword "traits") With bug fix releases the language is stable. Talking about the function library there is more change for multiple reasons. We /try/ not to break anything in bug fix releases. Sometimes trying is not enough. For one there are cases where there are big bugs which demand being fixed while changing the behavior (we have little choice for instance in areas related to security ...) and sometimes there are oversights. We are human and PHP is complex and our tests can't cover all use cases, there we can try to do our bust but still depend on everybody testing their applications (did YOU test 5.2.15RC1 and 5.3.4RC1, yet?) and use cases. johannes -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
