Re: [RFC] Name of Next Release of PHP

On 6 Jul 2014, at 16:12, Jocelyn Fournier <jocelyn.fournier@gmail.com> wrote: > It's my first post in this list, and wanted to share my external point of view, with a > parallel with the MySQL world. Welcome to PHP! :) > MySQL 6 was alpha in 2007 and finally was never released. > So far its name has never been reused (instead we had MySQL 5.6 and 5.7 to avoid confusion, and > there are also books about PHP 6 / MySQL 6) > Even on the MariaDB side, they bumped up the version to 10.0 to avoid confusion (and because it > was not based on MySQL 5.6). Similarly, ECMAScript 4, which was to be the replacement for ECMAScript 3, was abandoned and skipped, with ECMAScript 5 replacing it and ECMAScript 6/Harmony continuing it in spirit. There is some precedent for this. > There are quite a few tutorials and reference about PHP 6 on the web, it would be misleading to > have something completely different, but with the same name as the "old" PHP 6. However > I'm not convinced "7" is the right choice, perhaps a radical change in version number > would be better ? Well, 7 is a nice number. But yes, a more radical change might be better. How about PHP 14, after the year? PHP Loxodonta, a genus of elephants? PHP 14.mm, where mm is the month, following the Ubuntu month/year scheme? However, all other options only seem to have fringe support at the moment, so a binary 6/7 vote is optimal, unless you can find a name everyone can agree on. Keeping with 6 or 7 means we stick to our tried and tested naming scheme, too. I think that’d be for the best. Side note: another thought comes to me now that just skipping 6 and going to 7 makes little sense in a way, as 7 isn’t the successor to 6, it is the second successor to 5, the first (the old PHP 6) having been abandoned. -- Andrea Faulds http://ajf.me/