Re: Re: References Problem Patch

On Mon, May 30, 2005 at 08:58:47AM -0700, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote: > I think many people rely heavily on the packages maintained by the > various Linux distributions. A binary compatibility break is a burden > on the maintainers of these packages, but beyond needing to update every > PHP package, the end user really isn't burdened by it in any way unless > they have their own custom extensions, or if they have pecl extensions > installed, they'll need to grab them again from pecl and build against > the new dev files. > > If the cost of fixing this is purely on us and a handful of distribution > maintainers with minimal cost to the end users, then I think the choice > should be simple here. Asking Joe Orton and the various other package > maintainers from the major distros might be a good idea too. I think it's fair to say we would not ship a php update for Fedora Core 3 (and certainly not for RHEL) which broke third-party module compability unless it was a for a really critical issue i.e. remotely exploitable security bug. I'm not sure this bug qualifies, given that it can be worked around. I'd say that distribution users typically value a stable platform with known flaws, over an unstable platform which breaks compatibility across updates. Such users are not necessarily typical of PHP users as a whole, of course. joe