On 28 November 2012 14:03, Adam Harvey <ahar...@php.net> wrote: <big snip, voting open, et cetera>
OK, so the first e-mail was the official announcement of voting being open. I'd now like to quickly lay out why I voted yes, and why I think it's the right way forward. Feel free to hit next if your mind is already made up. :) Ulf produced a blackly entertaining timeline of MySQL support in PHP in one of the earlier RFC threads[0]. We've had better options than ext/mysql available in mainline, stable releases since 2004, yet it's taken a long time for there to be a serious push to encourage users to use the newer extensions. There are both a carrot and a stick here. The carrot is well laid out by Ulf in his blog post[1] — the newer extensions are more featureful, faster, and in the case of PDO particularly, easier to use (and harder to misuse). The stick is that we have this faintly ridiculous situation where we have four extensions in php-src for accessing one DBMS, one of which (ext/mysql) is barely maintained and has an API that encourages poor programming practice. Deprecating ext/mysql in PHP 5.5 doesn't mean it's going away immediately. It doesn't even mean it's going away next year: there's no reason at all we can't keep ext/mysql deprecated for more than one release branch. In fact, that would be my preference. As others have said: ext/mysql is a hugely used, popular extension. We can't rip it out overnight, and nor should we. Deprecation is a strong signal. It's a signal that it's time to update tutorials. It's a signal to schedule upgrades for code when new versions are written to use more modern APIs. It's a signal to those of us who speak at conferences, and help people in various fora and various ways that we should redouble our efforts to communicate the benefits of MySQLi and/or PDO. Most of all, it's a signal that we're serious about improving PHP and encouraging our users to improve their own code with us. Thanks for reading. If you got this far, I'll buy you the beer or non-alcoholic substitute of your choice at any conference I'm at next year. (Which, since I'm moving to Vancouver in the new year, may actually be a few.) Adam [0] http://news.php.net/php.internals/63982 [1] http://blog.ulf-wendel.de/2012/php-mysql-why-to-upgrade-extmysql/ -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
