Re: RIP PHP 4?

On 7/9/07, Derick Rethans <derick@php.net> wrote:

On Fri, 6 Jul 2007, Andi Gutmans wrote: I'd suggest something close to what Rasmus suggested: a) We make a clear statement on PHP.net that at the end of the year we plan to discontinue bug fixes for PHP 4 except for security fixes. b) We will discontinue supporting PHP 4 on 8/8/8 (because it sounds good and gives people about a year). The attached patch mentions the above. As you can see, the idea is to release this on the 13th, 3 years after php 5 was released for this first time.

First thanks for the patch! This paragraph is confusing and somehow made my point: +<p> + Hereby the PHP development team announces that support for PHP 4 will + continue until the end of this year only. From 2007-12-31 there will be no + more releases of PHP 4.4, besides important security releases. Security + releases will continue until 2008-08-08 after which PHP 4.4 will no longer be + supported officially. Please use the rest of this year to make your + application suitable to run on PHP 5. +</p> Either we support it or we don't. That means we support it for security problems only (all non sec bugs reported in php4 will be bogused or move to php5+ if still present). That also means we will have security release only until 2008-08-08. I know that it is what this paragraph says but it could be clearer. Something like: - From 2008-01-01, only security fixes will be fixed (btw, there is no "unimportant" security issue) - From 2008-08-08, PHP4 is dead, officially and physically Is there a way to tell something like that in a non confusing way? There is no need to hide the facts behind some form of kindness :-) hth Cheers, --Pierre