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 We can probably assume that most of these leagacy applications are no longer maintained, so their developers don't really need documentation for PHP4.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.
Not really. We already removed PHP3-specific content from the manual, PHP/FI as well. They are available separately and linked here:
http://php.net/docs.php
I think we all agree that versioned manual would be great for users but impossible to maintain for us. It would require enormous amounts of time to keep it up-to-date.
That's why I'm proposing rather painless compromise. I can't see any benefints coming from keeping such content forever in the main version of the manual. There are at most few percent of PHP users who still need that and 95% is forced to read whole text and ignore big amount of informations they just don't need and don't care about.
--
Andrea Faulds
http://ajf.me/
Greetings,
Maciej.