On 24.03.2007, at 18:04, Bèr Kessels wrote:
If the choice is between supporting the latest Drupal or rebuilding your server architecture to support a newer version of PHP, I am certain the mayority will choose to simply drop Drupal support.
Drupal is not in a position where we should try with all means that Fantastico et al keep us in their distribution. It's not that Drupal is at a point where we desperately need any user. Existing users will update their platform (I did that with MySQL) to continue using Drupal. Backwards compatibility has always been an issue. For Drupal, it has been decided to not make Drupal versions backward compatible but to only provide an upgrade path. And that's a good decisions. Take a loot at Microsoft Windows: They try to be as much backward compatible as possible, and for that reason, they always run in problems. I read recently that people complained that Vista doesn't ship the Help viewer by default and that Microsoft had to provide a Vista- compatible version. Microsoft dropped the Help viewer because it was there since Windows 3.1 (!) and didn't get any updates. In contrast to that are Mac OS and Linux: Apple generally doesn't care to provide lots of backward compatibility, new software is usually for the most recent OS and sometimes for the previous version (thus 10.3 and 10.4 atm) only. My point is that providing too much backward compatibility hinders progress. Especially in our domain, the internet, you can't afford to not advance if you want to stay up to par with competitors. I don't say however, that we should not support old versions anymore, that's something entirely different. Konstantin Käfer – http://kkaefer.com/