Re: References Problem Patch

At 12:00 30/05/2005, Lukas Smith wrote:

Derick Rethans wrote:

Hi Dmitry, On Thu, 26 May 2005, Dmitry Stogov wrote:

This patch breaks binary compatibility. It cannot be broken in 4.3.x tree, and that doesn't make sense to release 4.4 just for this patch.

You mean that they think that it doesn't make sense to fix PHP in cases where it's totally broken? I think that's totally irresponsible behavior. Thousands of people still use PHP 4 for good reasons. If you look correctly through the bug database you'll find atleast 10 bugs related to strange segfaults and some have been confirmed to be related to references that crash PHP. I think we should definitely put this in a PHP release, although the patch doesn't fix all segfaults yet. (Patch is at: http://files.derickrethans.nl/patches/ze1-return-reference-20050429.diff.txt)

I also agree that these issues need to be fixed inside the 4.x tree. What would be the motivation no to release a 4.4 to fix these issues? Beating users with a stick towards PHP 5?

In my opinion we should probably not fix this at all in the 4.x tree, because the hassle involved in starting a new 4.4 branch - breaking module compatibility for everyone, confusing people (imagine Apache 1.4 coming out at this point), etc. If it was an issue that everyone and their dog was bumping into, then I may have thought differently - but it's an issue that is rare enough, and can be worked around. And those that really need it to be fixed - can use the patch. Does everyone else think that this issue warrants starting a new version branch? Zeev