On 30 July 2012 16:02, Lester Caine <les...@lsces.co.uk> wrote: > Moving people from 5.2 is probably going to be as bad as killing off PHP4 > and 4.6% of sites are still using that! But the main problem starting to > happen now is that developers are upgrading projects to use 5.3 and 5.4 > features, but simply assuming that the user is working with the latest. > 'Security warnings' get people to upgrade their own installs, but on top of > a stack provided by their hosting company. Result ... sites stop working ... > please can developers take a little more care checking for compatibility, > and at least warn if something will not work on earlier versions of PHP.
What, specifically, have you found that isn't covered in the release notes and/or migration guide for PHP 5.3 and 5.4? Documentation bugs would be awesome here. (Patches would be even more awesome.) It's hard to improve this without detailed information, since the migration guides feel reasonably complete at this point. > Promoting PHP5.4 to the distributions should perhaps be done a little more? What additional promotion do you have in mind? > SUSE still does not have even an experimental version of 5.4, and the > private build doesn't work with it's own apache 2.4 or the stock 2.2. SUSE seem to be an outlier here: Fedora 17 has PHP 5.4, Ubuntu 12.10 will ship with 5.4, Debian testing and unstable have 5.4, FreeBSD has 5.4 in ports, and Arch has 5.4, to name but a few. > If the distributions are not using 5.4 what chance is there of the ISP's > switching? Agreed, but as I said above, I think the distributions are using 5.4, generally speaking. > So what is the best way of getting the user base behind us using even PHP5.4 > so that any discussion of even more changes in PHP6 makes sense at all? The same chicken and egg scenario once existed around PHP 5. The community saw the merit in PHP 5 (5.2, specifically), and created gophp5.org (now squatted, sadly) which was a rather successful campaign to raise awareness of the issue, and ended with the situation we're now in where most actively-developed frameworks and projects require PHP 5.2 or 5.3 and use their features. (It's also worth remembering that the BC concerns aren't as drastic for a lot of people as they seem to be for you, Lester — a lot of codebases seem to have been migrated from PHP 4 to 5 with little to no hassle.) So I think the answer, largely, is "build it and they will come". I'm not claiming that our migration documentation or BC are perfect as they stand. They can always be improved. But beyond documentation, I'm not sure what else we can do from Internals, short of sticking a fork in the language, calling it done, and never adding another feature. Adam -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
