Re: PHP 5.3 == PHP 6?

Wietse Venema wrote:

Johannes Schl�ter:

Hi, On Fri, 2008-04-11 at 16:07 -0400, (Wietse Venema) wrote:

According statistics at nexen.net, PHP4 is now 68% of the installed base (8 years of deployment) and PHP5 is 32% (almost 4 years). The lesson I draw from this is that a major release every couple years would heavily fragment the installed base, and complicate support.

The problem with these stats is that they count the public available installation base into account. There are many systems which simply run without any change to anything you will find lots of outdated software there. I have other stats about systems used when installing some piece of software and there PHP 5 is > 60% which is a completely different picture. So in summary: Statistics are nice, but not everything.

Whether 30% or 60%, after four years of PHP5 deployment there is a significant portion of installed base that has not caught up, hence my concern about fragmentation (I expect that many will agree that the smaller the PHP4 share, the better).

That is why PHP4 'development' should have been phased out earlier, something which HAS finally been done. But is it any reason that PHP6 should be held up any more? Continuing to 'develop' PHP5 is EXACTLY what happened with PHP4 and why progress TO PHP5 has been so slow. Are we going to have to wait another 4 years for PHP6? We NEEDED unicode years ago - which is why people are now wasting time with further bodges to get it into PHP5! Lets just get PHP6 out of the door so that USERS (like me) can then start moving to it and eliminate the debate. If you want clean unicode - PHP6 - if you are happy with single byte ascii stay with PHP5 ? -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://home.lsces.co.uk/lsces/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://home.lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk// Firebird - http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php