Re: Re: how to deal with php5 only packages

David Costa wrote:

On Jun 16, 2004, at 10:15 PM, Justin Patrin wrote:

snip

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?

yes please read http://www.zend.com/php5/casestudies/php5-dotgeek.php

Very nice, thanks for the link.

If I upgraded our servers to PHP5, things would break. Period.

what would break ? that depends on your code, if you re-assigned $this etc many things would probably break even in PHP 4 if you turn on a more strict error checking or well for some coders all breaks if you turn reg_globals off :D

I'm not reassigning this...I thought that some PEAR package did, but maybe not ones I'm using. It was my understanding that some things were just "different" and would break earlier scripts. I haven't myself used PHP5 yet (as at work I can't and at home I don' thave the time), so I was relying on stuff form lists. It was a while ago that I heard about this, though, so it's likely that I'm mistaken. Is there a definitive list of the things that are *changed* in PHP5 vs. PHP4? Not new features, I mean anything that will break scripts.

Yes, I plan to upgrade, but I have to prove to my boss(es) that PHP5 is stable and will work for our sites.

right, I don't see this in conflict with a PEAR package working only with PHP 5.

I wasn't really arguing this point. I should have changed my topic. :-)

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.

They won't break if you prepare before the move.

Yes. But as the only developer with a massive code-base to check, it's going to take me a long time...

Now, I'm not saying that PHP5 compatibility is a bad thing. PHP5 packages are great.

good then we are on the same page

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 However, you can't just say that PHP4 is outdated and no one should code for it any more.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.

Which problems ? Why is not stable ? Sure it is not declared stable now, but I tried it in a server (see above article) with over 1200 users.

Ok, it's a good start. I actually have no problems with going to PHP5 myself, but if something broke....some piece of functionality that didn't get tested or is rarely used elsewhere, I could be in a world of hurt...

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.

Under this idea nobody will switch(or very late) will just look around and wait for I don't know whom to switch. Nothing will just break like that. The effort vs the benefit does make sense to me but again, that's my own experience. In short I am not saying "no PHP 4 packages anymore" but I don't see why I have to prove why I want to release a PHP 5 package, with all the limitations of the case (less users, not stable etc). Cheers David Costa

-- paperCrane <Justin Patrin> -- PEAR Development Mailing List (http://pear.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php

-- paperCrane <Justin Patrin>