Re: PHP 6.0 Wishlist

Hi, > > First of all, in general - I don't subscribe to the school of 'we broke > something, why not break more'. With every feature we break, we reduce the > chances of people upgrading, of legacy apps working, and we reduce the > overall success chances of the new version. Compatibility breakup is not > binary, it accumulates. The more features are broken, the worse the > situation becomes. > I couldn't agree more. > >1. Remove register_globals completely > > > >2. Remove magic_quotes_* > > Given what I said above, I don't see any motivation to remove > register_globals or magic_quotes. I don't see how it buys us anything > other than pissed off users and hordes of (sometimes exploitable) bugs that > will result from sloppy audits. These changes alone would mean that a > great deal of the applications would have to be 100% audited before an > upgrade. Between us, developers welcoming forced labor due to upgrades is > wishful thinking. People never like to be forced to go over their or other > people's code regardless of the circumstances. > +1000 for not removing the register_globals. > > As I'm sure you'd agree, academic purity is not exactly why PHP won the > hearts of the masses. I would almost argue the opposite. Features which > only bother us due to academic purity are clearly ones we shouldn't > touch. Even more so than register_globals and magic_quotes - which are not > only impure but also problematic - there's no point forcing people to > modify their code just because we feel like making PHP more academically > pure. Other than creating a huge worldwide mess and slowing down > migration, we're not going to gain anything (assuming we don't get any > points for academic purity; PHP scored 100 when handed in as an academic > project, by the way :). > > Even if we forget about the users, and only think about ourselves - unless > something drastic happens, we're going to look at supporting 4 major > different versions simultaneously - 4.3/4.4, 5.0, 5.1 and 6.0. Is it > really such a great idea to start breaking compatibility beyond what we > absolutely have to? > > I think you have some good ideas in that list, and some less good > ideas. I'm worried about the wholesale mode that internals@ switched into, > the almost unanimous "YES!" response, and the overall feeling that suddenly > with 6.0 breakage comes without a price. That goes counter to our key > design goals in the Unicode support, which were work-as-if-nothing-happened > when unicode support is disabled. I sure hope others come to support your way of thinking. Sometimes the purist way of thinking can cause more problems than good.