RE: [PEAR-DEV] PHP 5

> My only fright is to deal with bugs in PHP 5, I don't really think that > all the things in this new release will work from the first moment > (remember PHP 4?). Yes, I think it would be dangerous to jump over to php5 too fast. But I also agree that two branches should be maintained in the beginning to start making use of some of the PHP5 stuff, allthough I would not go so far as to freeze the PHP4 branch just now. I think for now it should still be possible to work on code for both branches but for any feature enhancement it would be done to both branches unless it is a PHP5 specific enhancement. But I think it is very important for PEAR to be as feature rich as possible for php4 as well. So I think a guide to how to make use of the new features but provide similar (maybe less performant) functionality under php4. Atleast this guide should help in making the differences between branches as small as possible to make the maintaining easier. The way I understood PEAR it does try to maintain a high standard so it can require that extra effort also in the compatibility side of things. Personally I will try to move over PHP ASAP, just so we can learn more about PHP5. But I too am afraid that we will first have to wait for all the little issues to be resolved before we will move any customers over to PHP5. So all in all I would say definitely keep developing for the PHP4 users. If 2 branches is considered too much to maintain then I would rather like to see php version conditional code within one branch that will ensure atleast that both PHP4 and PHP5 users get new stuff as well as bugfixes. It is always very important to keep the current userbase happy before trying to capture new users through new functionality. And a lot of people seem to be quite happy with what PHP4 can do for them. Keep in mind that a lot of people might not even care about OOP even if they use PEAR, so PHP5 could be not that big of a deal from their perspecitive. It is a big deal for PEAR but they might not see this. Best regards, Lukas Smith smith@dybnet.de _______________________________ DybNet Internet Solutions GbR Alt Moabit 89 10559 Berlin Germany Tel. : +49 30 83 22 50 00 Fax : +49 30 83 22 50 07 www.dybnet.de info@dybnet.de _______________________________