> > #1 and #2 may be considered to be genuine improvements by the user > community, but #3 most certainly will not. It does not matter how you > try to dress it up, forcing your end users to jump through hoops before > they can upgrade is a customer relations disaster.
PHP and other scripting languages have done it before. They will do it again. From time to time, major release really means some rare cases won't work as before and require manual intervention to make work again. It's not php-exclusive. Hell, even in the linux kernel, drivers and infrastructure from bottom to top we see it every day. Design changes, things break, fix or perish. 1995 HTML will probably not look exactly as intended when browsed with today's browsers. Chances are, even your 20 year old C or C++ code won't compile on the latest gcc without some trivial changes or some additional compile options and even if it does, it will violate some widely accepted policy. In distribution packaging, we face the latter more often than you think. This is especially true with feature-complete software dinosaurs. Software needs maint. to keep it alive in an ever changing environment of hardware, OS, platform libraries etc. If PHP decides to drop PHP4 constructors in PHP7, which is 2 and a half major releases later, then you can run your older PHP, you can add support via an extension or fork or you can do trivial changes to your libraries. Each has its own costs. Doing nothing also has costs. I have to maintain some customer apps on a PHP4-based framework (version). It hasn't been fun to keep it working on PHP5.3++ and it won't be fun on PHP7 either. It's just the way it is. I think the customer will be charged a lot of support hours but he will get a much better product. In theory, I could just run older PHP releases but in practice, I wont. I am in favor of the change but I am currently not technically able to vote. -- Ralf Lang Linux Consultant / Developer Tel.: +49-170-6381563 Mail: l...@b1-systems.de B1 Systems GmbH Osterfeldstraße 7 / 85088 Vohburg / http://www.b1-systems.de GF: Ralph Dehner / Unternehmenssitz: Vohburg / AG: Ingolstadt,HRB 3537
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