> > > > - Rolling out a 5.7 with Warnings-of-any-kind + some little-or-not new > > features cancels point number one > > > > What else ? > > Do nothing is still (IMHO) the most sensible option IMHO. We're not seeing > major compatibility breakages in 7.0 (at least not at this time), to the > level that upgrading through some middle version is really all that > necessary.
we don't have much or really big ones(yet), we have a couple of nasty ones (eg. doesn't blow up, but behaves differently, check the mails from Derick complaining about those). and there are a couple ones upcoming/likely to make it through: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/remove_deprecated_functionality_in_php7 https://wiki.php.net/rfc/remove_php4_constructors > Considering the adoption levels of 5.6, 5.5 and even 5.4, we can > expect that most people migrating to PHP 7 will not be doing it from one of > the latest PHP 5.x versions, but older ones, rendering all of these options > useless. while I hope that you are right, but I think that PHP7 will be really interesting for two kind of people: - people who are looking for performance gains, even if it makes rewriting some code (and those who can this way have a feasible alternative instead of moving to hhvm/hack). - people who wants to start a greenfield project and for some reason they already decided to do in in php (because they already invested into the technology or because php is a really good choice for their usecase) and they are able to control their infrastructure so that they can have 7.0 on it. - they really need a feature which only 7.0 has and doing it in userland would be too hard to do or unfeasible (not sure if we have something like this in 7.0). Worst case the others will probably upgrade in the same tempo as they are currently doing or the way they did with php4 vs php5. I think that the only thing which really had an impact on the adoption rates is the fact that we provided stuff what modern frameworks/apps needed and made it easier to users/distros to upgrade. I think it is important to not forget those, and sometimes I feel that we are focus too much on shipping PHP7 only with the performance gains already present or to force people to upgrade (instead making sure that we provide what they want and the easiest upgrade path possible). > The one option that could be relevant to these scenarios is a > separate analysis tool, but it's much more difficult to pull off, and I > don't think the level of breakage (as it appears right now) justifies the > effort. > > fortunately we already have a couple of those for some of the nasty changes like https://gist.github.com/nikic/ffd019ef78b72934c7cc for finding code which would be affected by the behavior change of https://wiki.php.net/rfc/uniform_variable_syntax I do think that while those kind of extra steps are not mandatory per se, but they help a lot when convincing people to jump the ship and upgrade. -- Ferenc Kovács @Tyr43l - http://tyrael.hu
