Ashar Voultoiz wrote: > Looking at INSTALL it seems we are still supporting PHP version 5.1 > which is 5 years old in a couple of weeks. This is getting old and > prevents developers from using some new features. > > Ideally we could raise it to 5.3 to get Namespace support, closures but > that might be to early since most webhost probably still use 5.2.x. > > Would it be possible to consider raising the requirement to at least > 5.2.0 ? This would give us native JSON support and most probably the > filter extension enabled by default. The later can be used to speed up > the input validation.
Apparently WordPress had this discussion in July, but unlike us, they had usage statistics: <http://wpdevel.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/suggest-topics-for-the-july-15-2010-dev/> For WordPress 2.7+ as of July, the version distribution was: 4.3 – 1.3% 4.4 – 6.3% 5.0 – 0.1% 5.1 – 3.5% 5.2 – 85.4% 5.3 – 3.4% I don't think JSON support is particularly important since it can easily be simulated, and I don't think you should use the filter extension in MediaWiki, regardless of whether it is supported. However, I can think of a good argument for moving to PHP 5.2, which is to stop the high rate of bit rot in 5.1 support. In particular, support for callbacks with double-colons to indicate static method calls: call_user_func( 'Foo::bar' ) was added in PHP 5.2.3. Developers often use these, and don't realise that they are breaking PHP 5.1 support. So I think there's a good argument for making 5.2.3 the minimum. Another example of bit rot: the trunk has 3 calls to array_fill_keys(), with no simulation in GlobalFunctions.php; it was added in 5.2.0. Developers should really check the versions in the manual when they use a function, otherwise 5.2.x will soon be broken as well, in favour of 5.3.x. But in theory we can weed out calls to newly-added functions with grep. The 5.2.3 callback change was more subtle. -- Tim Starling _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
