Sherif, You see, I'm skeptical about this approach. Mainly because I don't see > how any of that has proven to be the case in the past. Albeit, we've > never deprecated such a heavily used extension before in the past, but > still. There remains the issue of "how many people will actually read > the manual" vs. "how many will take this as a precursor to either stop > using the extension in development of new applications (we already > advice against that now in the manual by the way)" vs. "how many will > take action to not upgrade or fix their legacy code" vs. "how many > people actually intend on upgrading to PHP 5.5 when they have legacy > code dependent on ext/mysl". I think these questions need to be > considered more seriously in order to re-evaluate the proposal of > "delaying E_DEPRECATED for ext/mysql is really going to help people". >
If it wasn't that active open source projects still have ext/mysql as their primary connection today, I would agree with you. But we still have open source projects, major ones, that still rely on it even in their dev versions. Sure Wordpress may have a patch available, but will it work with extensions? Likely not. Right now, it's just "discouraged for new development". Not "you really need to get off it now". By adding E_DEPRECATED, you're basically saying "see, we told you to get off it", when we never did. I think controlled communication and collaboration with the involved projects would go a long way to maintaining (and restoring to some extent) the health of the community. And it's one thing to have the warning that says "It's discouraged", and having a warning that says "It's officially deprecated. In the next release, we're going to start throwing deprecated notices if you use it. And the release after that, it's going to disappear. So get migrating off it now". They convey completely different things. The first sounds like "best practices", where the second shows the gravity of the situation... > Does any of this really help anyone affected by the deprecation of the > extension? I can't possibly see how since those that are still using > it will just likely not upgrade to PHP 5.5 if their legacy code can > not due without ext/mysql. Your not considering the sheer number of > projects that still haven't upgraded from 5.3 let alone 5.4. > Well, there's a difference between taking advantage of newer features, and being compatible with newer versions. Wordpress runs on 5.4. Just because the project doesn't use namespaces or short array syntax doesn't mean that it won't run on it. So there's a huge difference between compatible with and adopted fully. For some projects it may never make sense to use newer features. And that's fine, there's NOTHING wrong with that. But we shouldn't use those as examples that we can ignore them when it comes to future planning... > I really urge everyone reconsider the reality of delaying the warnings > and what good that actually brings. > I do as well. I'm not saying my view is correct. I'm saying it's my view. I believe it, but I urge people to make up their own minds as well... Anthony
