but this wouldn't be any different from any other api/abi bump. furthermore,
Of course. If there are two different PHP versions with different API numbers, it's OK. What's less OK is when there's two PHP builds with same API numbers which are binary incompatible.
in the context of running debian (and by extension ubuntu) servers, you wouldn't need to do anything if you were only using the pre-packaged modules,
You mean - pre-packaged by Debian?
need to do an "apt-get upgrade", etc. and if you were using other pecl extensions, i think the command to update that isn't so complicated either :)
Compatibility is not complicated if you deal with one machine where you control everything and can rebuild everything from source. It starts to get worse when you have a lot of machines on which you want to achieve some kind of common environment. Having indistinguishable binary incompatible PHP versions complicates things.
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Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect
stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/
(408)253-8829 MSN: stas@zend.com