Re: Rolling PHP5 versions of PEAR packages

On 23 Mar 2004 at 20:43, Richard York wrote: > I'm seeing that PHP5 is getting closer and closer to being stable. > > I am currently working on a PHP5 version of Mail_IMAP.. obviously there > aren't going to be too many people using PHP5 as of yet at least till it > gets to a stable state. Until such time, how should I offer a PHP5 specific > version of my package? > > I thought a good way to do this would be to include an IMAP-PHP5.php file in > the package. Certainly as things progress eventually such a file would > replace the normal package file. But there comes the question of continuing > to support the PHP4 syntax. If you can make your package work on PHP4 and PHP5 both that's ideal for me. However, it's been mentioned that for some packages the improvements made by a php5-only-version are quite essential (e.g. because its much shorter or much faster with the php5-way of doing it) or that some cases need to be completely rewritten and can't be made functional under both php4 and php5. For a php5-only-release, move on to a new major release and give it a dependency to php >= 5, which several packages like PHPUnit2 already did. You can still maintain the php4-code for some time as well in the existing branch (major version). Stefan