Re: Easing major version upgrades

hi Lars, On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 6:57 PM, Lars Strojny <lars@strojny.net> wrote: > 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 BC breaks between x.y+1 are not allowed anymore. So that should not be a problem, or much more smaller issue than ever before. > 2.) Distributions slowly providing packages for new major versions debian, which was known to be slow at updating, will have 5.4 in next (or already has). RHEL or other centos with long term frozen versions are hopeless for what I can say. > 3.) Upgrades are hard, let’s go shopping aka never change a running system What do you mean here? > 4.) Popular and/or simply required extensions like memcache, apc, etc. aren’t prime-time > ready for the new version Right, that's acutally the main problem for many users I met (incl. too day at the DevCon in Hamburg). There is not much we can do without much more early feedbacks (during the whole RCs phase), and not after the final release. > 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. No chance to achieve that with the current resources. Simply impossible. The campaign I am doing since a year is to explain our users (drupal devs, symfony, at all confs I go) how easy it is now to contribute to PHP, to test RCs as well as all the extensions they use with PHP. About APC, yes, I definitively would like to get an opcode cache only version of APC, with very few or almost no ini setting, no user cache, cleaned from all these esoteric ( 0.01% of the users using them), etc. But that's a different topic :) Cheers, -- Pierre @pierrejoye | http://blog.thepimp.net | http://www.libgd.org