[php-maint] Re: Moving forward with php

[Andrew McMillan]

On Thu, 2007-03-15 at 19:15 +0100, sean finney wrote:
> 
> -- php4 --
> 
> first things first, i want to bring up the topic of dropping php4.  i've
> been putting off bringing this up for quite a while, and in the meantime
> it seems the folks in ubuntu have gone through a similar thought process
> and php4 is removed from feisty.
> 
> i'm not saying we need to do this now, but i think it would be in our
> best interests to have it removed before lenny is released, and want to
> get people at least thinking about it now.

Hi Sean,

It is good to have warning that this is likely to happen.  I have only
recently switched to PHP5 for my development environment, and have just
been bitten by the change in the behaviour of '=' with objects.

We have many PHP based sites, some were written with PHP3, most with
PHP4, and newer ones are being written with PHP5.  Given that Sarge did
not have PHP5 (at all) and many production websites will have been
written to operate on a stable release it has only been recently that we
have been able to switch to PHP5 development, with the expectation of
using Etch availability for the production environment.

So, if Etch is to be the first release to include PHP5, should it also
be the last to include PHP4?  Should we really be looking to immediately
remove PHP4 support?  I guess if Lenny is not to be released until 2009
or so then it should definitely be excluded, but if it is released in
2008 perhaps it could still be included.

The situation is different for Ubuntu, which has a much faster release
cycle, so will have had several releases which included PHP5, before
dropping PHP4 support.

Regards,
				Andrew McMillan.

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