Adam Harvey wrote:
What, specifically, have you found that isn't covered in the release
notes and/or migration guide for PHP 5.3 and 5.4? Documentation bugs
would be awesome here. (Patches would be even more awesome.)
It's hard to improve this without detailed information, since the
migration guides feel reasonably complete at this point.
I'm appealing here to the developers who use that information !!!!
The latest problem was with a 'TIKI' which stopped working after a 'security
update', but the newer version did not bother to check that 5.3 was available
and it messed up on the customers 5.2 setup. I've helped with several problems
over the last few months, either down to PHP version changes or project changes
that did not watch for what PHP version was running.
So what is the best way of getting the user base behind us using even PHP5.4
so that any discussion of even more changes in PHP6 makes sense at all?
The same chicken and egg scenario once existed around PHP 5. The
community saw the merit in PHP 5 (5.2, specifically), and created
gophp5.org (now squatted, sadly) which was a rather successful
campaign to raise awareness of the issue, and ended with the situation
we're now in where most actively-developed frameworks and projects
require PHP 5.2 or 5.3 and use their features. (It's also worth
remembering that the BC concerns aren't as drastic for a lot of people
as they seem to be for you, Lester — a lot of codebases seem to have
been migrated from PHP 4 to 5 with little to no hassle.)
I'm still making sure that upgrades run on 5.2, but I've had to set up a 5.2,
5.3 and 5.4 setups to make sure of that. The hassle at the moment is just silly
little things that the developer could quite easily avoided if they also still
considered the end users situation? When a users site goes down, THEY tend not
to be competent enough to fix the problem ... and then saying 'you need to
upgrade php' is even less helpful. Migration can be made hassle free, but WE
need to make that happen! Some of the black holes created by PHP5.3 and 5.4 are
well documented, but unless developers take the care to work around them sites
go down, and then getting an ISP to fix the background installation is not
necessarily easy.
So I think the answer, largely, is "build it and they will come".
I'm not claiming that our migration documentation or BC are perfect as
they stand. They can always be improved. But beyond documentation, I'm
not sure what else we can do from Internals, short of sticking a fork
in the language, calling it done, and never adding another feature.
In hindsight PHP5.3 should have been labelled PHP6 and the 5.2 supported a
little longer. 60% of the world still has the latest identified security
problems in their installations :( It's Internals that decides when a version is
dropped, but I don't think enough consideration was given this time to the end
users?
( I'm looking again at another distribution since SUSE seems to in something of
a mire at the moment :( But having used it since the late 90's ... )
--
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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