Excerpts from Kalle Sommer Nielsen's message of Thu Sep 22 08:03:19 -0700 2011: > Hi > > 2011/9/22 Daniel Convissor <dani...@analysisandsolutions.com>: > > Breaking PHP for untold thousands upon thousands of applications created > > over the past nine years is a FAR bigger problem for our image. > > While don't like the change due the break in a stable branch which I > also wrote about in the bug report. Then I don't see why this was not > caught in one of the RC packages sent out to confirm there was no > behavior changes, but we got no feedback on it and went ahead. While > it is unfortunate and it should have been reverted in the patch level > sort of release, it wasn't. >
So I see that 5.3.7 was in RC from 6/16 until it was released August 18. In all that time, nobody caught this behavior problem, because nobody seems to have tested the RC's with code that was doing "the wrong thing". We're happy to get out ahead (in fact, I should say, Ondrej Sury from Debian is always far more active in this effort than any of us in Ubuntu are, we pretty much stand on his shoulders) and test RC's, but other than running the test suite, much like Ondrej did, I don't know that there would be much we can do in 2 months. We can't very well throw this new version into our dev release of Ubuntu and expect serious users to try it out. We are on a time based release in Ubuntu also, so we can't in good conscience go to RCX without some assurance that the final will a) be out before our release, and b) won't change behaviors from earlier RC's. So I'm not sure what you would expect from distros, but please share and we'll setup automated tests, call for our users to test, whatever it takes to avoid this type of situation. > Actually it is 7 years theoretically because we don't support PHP4, > while I know that the change was at our end, that still doesn't > justify a change of behavior in a package. It is not like we change > the inner workings of PHP when packaging the Windows port. > > What needs to be done here, is to simply "move on", endless rage is > not solving anything, nor is it to have everyone go their way. 5.4 is > coming a long greatly with the improved test cases, and I think to > isolate such issues then the package maintainers should test the RC's > with either popular packages in their system or related, so issues > like this is caught in that process. > There's no rage at all here. I think it makes sense to make a promise to users that behaviors will not change at all for any minor release series. 5.3.8 should work exactly like 5.3.0, except where the existing behavior was just too disruptive or dangerous. To me, the new behavior has been cited as more dangerous than the old one, so I'd think that people would want it to be reverted. But I would agree that quibbling over it endlessly is not productive. -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
