Re: Voting periods

On 01/29/2013 01:30 AM, Ryan McCue wrote:

If Wordpress announced that it was going to start requiring PHP 5.3 as of some date 6+ months in the future (and there are advantages to doing so that don't require major BC breaking rewrites), I think you'd see a rather significant abandonment of PHP 5.2 among hosts. Many other major projects already have. I would be rather surprised if Drupal 9 doesn't require PHP 5.4. (Drupal 8, currently in development, is very solidly PHP 5.3.)

Here's hoping that Drupal can lead that push with the major hosts. 5.2 on 66% of hosts is ridiculous, and I'm personally sick of having to backport things to 5.2. GoPHP5 was a *fantastic* effort and benefited WP immensely even if we weren't directly involved.

It's great to hear you say that, given that the messaging coming out of WP at the time was rather hostile. :-)

Most of the WordPress committers don't see much advantage with pushing to 5.3 though, so it's doubtful that we'll lead that charge. (Late static binding is probably the only thing that they would see as useful, but WP doesn't use many static methods.)

I don't know much if anything about WP internals, but in my experience with Drupal 8 LSB is about the only 5.3 feature that hasn't mattered to us. Namespaces/PSR-0 and closures have been very helpful. LSB not so much, but then I'm pleased to say we have very little static method use in the first place.

This all said, the internal dynamics of the WordPress core developers are always changing, and views are definitely becoming less conservative. I don't think you'll see us targeting 5.4 any time soon, but 5.3 is a possibility. I've been talking to a few contacts from the big hosts in the WP space and it seems like they've all got 5.3 upgrading in the pipeline.

Maybe next year it will be time for a GoPHP5.5 project. :-) Hopefully by then WP will have become less conservative enough to join the effort. --Larry Garfield