Re: PHP 5 RC1

On Tue, 11 Nov 2003, John Coggeshall wrote: > I know Shane was working on some major improvements to simplexml that I > don't know if he's finished yet. Sterling didn't seem to have any > interest in really finishing the code he did write from our > conversations. I know that Shane is also porting SOAP to the new DOM extension. I think it's important to have this be stable before PHP 5 goes final. > It'd also be a waste to release PHP 5.0, only to have 5.1 be the version > with all the non-OO new features just for the sake of it. It's widely > understood throughout the community that PHP 5 will be a *major* release > for PHP, and everyone expects to see things like MySQLi, PDO, > SimpleXML/XML, etc. Part of PHP 5 is the new language. The other part is the bundled extensions. I think we need to give developers time to complete the major extensions now that PHP 5 is more stable and we've decided upon the core APIs. For example, you need mysqlii to use MySQL 4.1+ with PHP. While PHP shouldn't be gated by MySQL's development, it'd be crappy to release PHP 5 without full MySQL 4.1 support. Since right now this requires a bitkeeper MySQL install, I can't believe many people even tested mysqli. So I'd prefer to wait until this solidifies. (Assuming the MySQL folks can hammer down MySQL 4.1 in a reasonable time frame.) > Considering there was absolutely no warning about an RC or feature > freeze, I suggest an alternative -- Set a firm date for a B3 release > (end of year), allow people who are actually working on PHP 5 related > ext stuff to get their code committed and finalized, and then release B3 > in the wild for a month. If it all floats then roll the RC. I'm with John here. -adam -- adam@trachtenberg.com