Re: Re: [PEPr] Comment on HTML::HTML_TagCloud

On 6/16/06, Martin Jansen <mj@php.net> wrote:

On Fri Jun 16, 2006 at 01:4136PM +0200, Hannes Magnusson wrote: Running under PHP6 I get 2 E_STRICT warnings (and dozen E_NOTICEs) running example2. Oh well, I must have missed that since 5.1.3 using "var" does not raise an E_STRICT warning anymore. Thanks, Hannes.

Good that you finally see what I say.

Unfortunately this is only half of the truth: I suppose most of us would be happy to see PHP 5 gain importance, but at the same we don't give people a killer argument to do the transition by adding PHP 4-compatible packages (I repeat myself here) two years after going public with 5.0.0.

PHP 5.0.0 was an alpha release, nothing else, the insane amount of breakages in 5.1 and 5.2 just prooves it. People are migrating to 5.1.x instead (like it was the case in 4.1/4.2, learn from history). The most important argument for me is to ease our users life. We can provide php5 only packages when it is required, but there is no reason to do it only to promote php5. That's counter productive.

My theory is that until a handful of prominent projects like PEAR, phpMyAdmin, Wordpress, et al. take heart to force PHP 5 on their users,

There is many theories, I try to keep facts in mind. In this case, 90% and more of the php install use php4, and that's an ISP problem not PEAR. Most of our packages work nicely in php5 and you can change the error_reporting mode in userland, even in safe_mode. Don't get me wrong, I would love to see 90% of PHP5.1 install. The "convert the infidels" logic is bad, it should not be a crusade but a pragmatic choice.

we will see a huge market share for PHP 4 by the time that PHP 6 is released. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is nothing we should be looking forward to.

People were saying the same about php5 and php3. History, history... Short version: the market decides, not the rules or regulations. If there is a need for php5 packages, people will write them (including existing pear developers, like QF2 for example). Cheers. --Pierre