Easing major version upgrades

Hi everybody, with the release of PHP 5.4 a similar pattern happened as with the release of 5.3: while we want people to upgrade as fast as possible, it is often a bumpy road for users to migrate to new versions. There are various reasons for it: 1.) Incompatible and hard to change codebases that won’t run on newer PHP versions 2.) Distributions slowly providing packages for new major versions 3.) Upgrades are hard, let’s go shopping aka never change a running system 4.) Popular and/or simply required extensions like memcache, apc, etc. aren’t prime-time ready for the new version While point one to three are merely a point we can campaign for (or against), point four is something we can do better. Two anecdotes about the current state of PHP 5.4 and popular extensions: we don’t have a (released) PHP 5.4 compatible version of the memcache extension and APC is still not ready for all of our users (including myself) but it is practically required for production setups. So we are six month into 5.4 but the perceived 5.4.0 is still due for a number of people. And this is something we should do better. There are various ways how to handle that situation: the "broaden the core" initiative is one of them (and bundling a stripped down version of APC is surely a good idea) but I would like to propose a simpler solution: we find out by a yet to be exactly determined combination of community survey and data analysis which PECL extensions are the most popular ones and make sure that the top X of them is ready when release 0 of a new major version is released. And we define this as a required part of our release process. If the most popular extensions aren’t compatible, the version 0 of a major release cannot ship. I'm not suggesting this will make everything nice and shiny but it will certainly ease the pain for our users. cu, Lars