[php-maint] Crafting email about php 5.4 for d-d-a

Ondřej Surý ondrej at sury.org
Thu Feb 2 15:27:39 UTC 2012


Hi,

I think that Thomas is right and we should send an email to d-d-a
about upcoming 5.4
upload. Here's my proposed text (based on what I have written to
debian-release):

--

Dear developers,

this is just a heads up that we will upload php 5.4 branch into
unstable very soon.
It is currently in RC phase and we spoke to PHP upstream and both parties think
this is a good idea to iron out more bugs for upstream and allow us to have more
time to transition.

Unfortunatelly PHP 5.4 introduce a couple of incompatible changes, most notably:
- safe_mode and register_globals was removed (THIS WILL BREAK SOFTWARE)
- default charset is now utf-8
- magic_quotes are deprecated (with warning)
- three new reserved words: callable, insteadof and trait
- multibyte support is now default
- removed syntax (break $var, continue $var)
- sqlite(1) extension was removed (already done in php5.3 in Debian)

For a full list you can check upstream UPGRADING readme:
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-php/php.git;a=blob;f=UPGRADING

php5-5.4.0~rc7-1 will be uploaded as soon as upstream tarball is available
(it's already tagged in upstream SVN). I will then block the
transition to testing
with a RC bug, so we can start testing existing software as soon as possible,
but keep testing in relatively stable state. The RC bug will be removed as soon
we get to 5.4.0 final.

I also plan to provide "official" backports for Debian squeeze, so people can
come and test new php5.4 before they upgrade to wheezy. I think that safe_mode
and register_globals removal deserves it.

Final note: We already had similar transitions in php (4->5, 5.2->5.3, etc.),
so it's not really that big deal, but it will require some amount of work hence
this email, so you can prepare yourself for the transition.

-- 
Ondřej Surý <ondrej at sury.org>



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