Rasmus wrote:
On 06/06/2011 08:38 PM, Lester Caine wrote:
Stas Malyshev wrote:
For many of us, the 5.2 branch HAS been the 'long term stability'
version of PHP
Any version beyond it's support period would be "long term stability"
(as in "pining for the fjords" stability) by definition. If somebody
want to backport patches and provide builds for it for any period he
likes - sure, but nobody volunteered so far, AFAIK.
This begs the question "Who decided that the only vesion of PHP
available to a potentially large section of the user base should be end
of lifed?" When was it voted on and was the problems of using a later
version on some existing platforms even considered in that discussion?
This I think is the crux of all the problems ... nobody actaully
considers the end users at all?
We did, the folks who actually work on this stuff. In order to move
forward we need to drop old branches. Right now we are working on 3
branches, which has proven over time to be right at the limit of what we
can handle. It may even be a branch more than we can handle.
And much like Apache, I don't consider it our job to do binary builds
for people. It is very nice that a few people have volunteered to build
Windows binaries and they are available on windows.php.net as a
convenience, but our primary focus is the source distribution and that's
where the bulk of the attention goes. If people are building critical
systems that rely on binary-only releases, they really should reconsider
how they do things and at the very least install a compiler on their
platform of choice and learn how to build stuff themselves. As far as I
know nothing that was available in 5.2 is not available in 5.3 in source
form.
People who are building critical systems are in a position to make a choice, and
THEY will not be using windows. But PHP was origianlly 'Personal Home Page' and
I am sure that as many people are using PHP because of the 'personal' element.
Those are the sort of people who 5 years ago could not afford to buy the M$
software to create their own builds, and even today some areas of windows can't
be built with the free version. We tried to fill the gap by writing our own
compilations to fill the gap, but today the problem is that there is simply no
beginners tutorial that directs people to how they can get around the problems
created by the current windows builds of PHP.
I said that moving people forward to PHP5.3 was another thread, and is work that
does need to be done, but simply kicking those people out into the cold is much
as M$ does every version is not the way to treat users. A SIMPLE clean set of
instructions on the windows download page would be a start, updating the manual
to reflect the current situation, and reporting errors to third party projects
that also return the wrong instructions would at least provide the assistance to
users who are not in a position to build the complete compile chain that is
required to work form source. Heck mine is broken again and I don't have time to
sort out why, so I've not been able to update some stuff for others :(
--
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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