[Fwd: E_ALL changes in 5.2/6.0]

Hi all, This email is a rather troubling indication of things to come. PEAR is lagging sadly behind in terms of this. This change Marcus is talking about is going to cause applications that worked just fine in PHP 5.1.4 to suddenly spew lots of errors when using PEAR apps. This will only occur on sites that have error reporting and error display on, but it is a serious thing to consider. What is more crucial to consider is that *all* packages that make use of PEAR::raiseError() or any other non-static function called statically will not work in PHP 6.0. There are other changes forthcoming. Time to smell the coffee folks. We need to split off PHP5-syntax packages on the main site, as this will make a large difference as to how useful the site is for users. I proposed a "groups" system for doing this a little while back on pear-core: http://beeblex.com/lists/index.php/php.pear.core/4346 and although I have not yet implemented it in pearweb because I'm waiting for Pierre to finish his mystery new code and commit the damn thing (ahem) this needs to happen very soon. More to the point, we need to re-evaluate the rather listless direction of PEAR. PEAR has always been about filling in the gaps in PHP. Recently, the project has kind of forgotten about this fact in the effort to satisfy both users who refuse to upgrade PHP and users who do upgrade PHP. We're in a tight spot. I don't have immediate answers, but I would like to see more useful innovation happening in PEAR. I'm not going to be able to take the lead on this question until the summer is over, due to terrible internet access for most of July and August among other things. However, I can get things started. I would like you all to consider this a friendly "get-off-your-ass" prod to start at least thinking about the problem. I only have one request: please do not post a reply with a solution until you have asked at least one other developer off-list what they think of your solution. We need carefully thought-out brilliant solutions or it will just clog the list :). Thanks, Greg