Yes, my thinking is along the lines of "any official feature-release after X date will assume PHP 5.x as a minimum." WHICH 5.x is an open question. (5.0.x was all sorts of nasty, from what I gather.) In my dream world we say 5.2, because 5.2 is where the really fun security features like input_filter and PDO come in as well as native JSON support, but I doubt we can get away with that because of RHEL. (As Ken said, ambitious. <g>) For the date itself, it couldn't be before 2008 sometime. I'm thinking 1 January or 1 April, but that depends on the other projects involved and how long it takes to agree on a date/version. TBD. On Tuesday 22 May 2007, Gordon Heydon wrote:
Hi,
I like this idea, and getting as many of the major PHP projects involved as possible would be the best way to go.
I like the setting of the date for dropping PHP4 support, as it gives something to work towards, but I think that it needs to be at least 12 months into the future to be nice to all the Hosting companies. This also gives the PHP projects 12 months to make sure that the current release is 100% on PHP5.
As has been said else where php4 is not going to go away on that date, but next major releases of these products after this will only support 5 and beyond.
Gordon.
Ken Rickard wrote:
All-
I received a private note from Larry Garfield this morning based on something I posted online, so it's time to make it more public.
Jonah Braun, who is on Joomla's security team and the 1,5 core team works in my office. When I came back from DrupalCON, I toid him that Rasmus had asked Drupal to drop support for PHP4. Jonah immediately took to the idea, and here's what he saw as the challenges.
Two problems with dropping PHP4 support:
1) Many hosts (including mine) only support 4.x 2) If one project (Drupal) drops it but the other doesn't (Joomla), the audience (both developers and users) may abandon the project that drops PHP4.
Jonah's modest proposal: An agreement to set a release version (or date) where major PHP-based projects drop PHP4 support.
Larry, always ambitious, suggested that we get WordPress and Galley involved, too.
I can very clearly see the advantage to projects setting an arbitrary date (say, January 1, 2008) after which we don't officially support PHP4. THis wouldn't say that we try to break PHP4, simply that new feature development (and patch support and security updates) require PHP 5.
So consider this a modest proposal to get folks thinking about how to move forward together. I already passed Larry on to Jonah to see who might make that decision on the Joomla side.
- Ken Rickard agentrickard
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-- 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