On Saturday 09 June 2007, Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
We don't need to publicize that there is a possibility that we can go back in our decision.
This is a reality check that leaves a fallback option open. If February comes and nothing changed as far as distros and hosting companies are concerned. What are we going to do then? Just keep forging ahead as if PHP4 does not exist, and corner ourselves?
We can say that we reevaluate this in February and that is it. We don't need to make any decisions now (apart from pushing hard for hosts and distros to go PHP5).
It's really disingenuous to plan for optionally changing our minds later. If all we do come February is say "we only support PHP 5 now" but we've still made sure the code works on PHP 4, then that's frankly dishonest. Rather, whatever version we expect to ship next after that date we should permit ourselves to use PHP 5-only features. There's plenty of places in core where that would greatly simplify things, but using PHP 5-specific features, naturally, means breaking PHP 4. (That's the evil cycle that we're all caught in right now.) And there's no reasonable way to then "undo" that if we decide "oh well, it wasn't quite as successful as we hoped, I guess we'll back out". It would be completely infeasible, not to mention destroying any credibility Drupal has in the OSS world. "Wait and see" means "don't participate at all". That would be really unfortunate, as this effort cannot be successful without big names like Drupal. -- Larry Garfield AIM: LOLG42 larry@garfieldtech.com ICQ: 6817012 "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it." -- Thomas Jefferson