Re: Remove pre PHP 5.4 documentation

On 19.12.2019 at 00:24, Philip Olson wrote: >> On Dec 17, 2019, at 8:15 AM, Christoph M. Becker <cmbecker69@gmx.de> wrote: >> >> I propose to remove all pre PHP 5.4 documentation from the manual, >> basically like we did with pre PHP 5.0 docs years ago. I don't think >> that there is much need to document the behavior of such old versions, >> and in my opinion, almost everybody (writers and readers alike) would be >> better off without these documentation parts. We could also remove >> documentation regarding extensions which are unbundled as of PHP 5.4.0 >> (e.g. ext/sqlite). >> >> Thoughts? > > IMHO it'd be okay to update inline documentation (e.g., "As of PHP 7.0.0, ...") > and instead document 7+ as a first class citizen and then move (not remove) > 5.x specific stuff to the individual changelog sections, and also move critically > important differences to notes. That makes sense, but would require even more manpower then just dropping the respective documentation parts (also consider the translations). > The documentation is useful for refactoring/understanding older PHP > code (there's a lot!) so having old and new information together is helpful. > But I agree that a zillion inline version references gets messy so would > focus on fixing those starting today. > > As for removing unbundled extensions, what does that mean in relation > to PECL? I should have been more clear about that in the first place. I was actually referring to unbundled extensions which have been unmaintained in PECL since then. > Lastly, I recently had the luxury of working on a CentOS box that had PHP 5.4 > as its current version; and learned this is EL 7's default PHP version. So, > there's also that. Well, the suggestion was to remove *pre* PHP 5.4 documentation. :) -- Christoph M. Becker