Re: how to deal with php5 only packages

Hans wrote:

Lukas Smith wrote:

David Costa wrote:

Didn't we agree that the proposal of PHP 5 packages was fine as long as E_STRICT compliant and not stable till PHP 5 is ? You are free to recommend otherwise but I don't think that the approach "PHP 4 works, so why switch" is very progressive.

With PHP5 only you are shutting out most of the PHP world. This fact will change but I am sure you can come up with better reasons to use PHP5 than marking things private? Also your examples have yet to include examples where you would actually have to do more planning.

I think everyone agrees that fewer people will use a PHP5-only package. David has mentioned that already; I certainly know it's true. To me this is no reason not to have a PHP5-only package -- especially considering everyone agrees that these packages will not be stable until PHP5 is. I don't even think a justification other than "I want it to run with my app that runs under E_STRICT" is necessary. PHP5 is the new version of PHP. I see no reason to start developing any new software for PHP4 at this point. I don't care that certain shared host users won't be able to use PHP5 until later (get a new shared hosting provider! i've been using PHP5 on my shared hosting provider since PHP5.0.0beta1).

It's not just shared hosts. If you really want stability (and / or are forced to prove it) then you can't just switch to PHP5. Don't any of you people actually WORK with PHP? If I upgraded our servers to PHP5, things would break. Period. Yes, I plan to upgrade, but I have to prove to my boss(es) that PHP5 is stable and will work for our sites. Not only that, it could easily be non-trivial to upgrade all of our code to PHP5. There's a LOT of PHP code on our sites. Not only that, I use a lot of components (most form PEAR) and if they break with PHP5 I'm pretty much screwed. Now, I'm not saying that PHP5 compatibility is a bad thing. PHP5 packages are great. I hope all of PEAR's packages will get PHP5 compatibility soon. However, you can't just say that PHP4 is outdated and no one should code for it any more. PHP5 is not stable yet and will still have problems when it is stable. Once more bugs are worked out and it has proven viability in the real world (not bleeding edge user shared hosts but real corporate websites) and has had enough code upgraded to work with it...THEN everyone should be switching. But until then people who have to work with stability in mind (like me) will be staying with PHP4. At least for critical applications. -- paperCrane <Justin Patrin>