Re: Proposal of removing PHP4 references from the manual

On 13 Jul 2014, at 07:44, Maciej Sobaczewski <sobak@php.net> wrote: > I know - this is very controversial topic, but please, at least try to read my whole post, > before you comment. This proposal is one step ahead from "Making PHP 5 a first class citizen > rewrite"[1], but over four years passed since it was proposed[2], so I think that situation > also changed a little. > > The goal is of course increasing readability of the PHP Manual. 7th of August will be 6th > anniversary of EOL for PHP4 line[3]. W3Tech claims that PHP4 is used by about 1.7% of all > websites[4]. We can probably assume that most of these leagacy applications are no longer > maintained, so their developers don't really need documentation for PHP4. Removing references > to PHP4 is one of the methods of urging people to upgrade from PHP4 and we want it, don't we? I don’t think we should remove PHP4 from the manual. PHP’s current documentation approach is one manual for all the versions, unlike Python, which has one manual for each version. If we're removing PHP 4, then we should probably switch to the Python model, though myself I think there’s no point in having a manual for each 5.x version; we should just have a “PHP 4” manual (frozen in time) and a “PHP 5” manual. If PHP 6 (sorry, PHP NEXT ;) happens, that could have a “PHP 6” manual. -- Andrea Faulds http://ajf.me/