[development] Looking forward next year and PHP versions

[Gordon Heydon]

Hi,

Karoly Negyesi wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Unlike the MySQL version, I am not sure at all but here are some
> thoughts.
> 
> First, how is the world regarding PHP versions?
> 
> *) By 2007, Debian Etch with PHP5 support will be out. (It's
> currently scheduled to December 2006 and even if it slips to Jan
> 2007, it matters little here). Please do not litter the thread with
> praise/critique/flames re. Debian.

This is just great. I have using the experimental versions of this for 
ages. And I think that this is what is in Ubuntu Linux.

For me Debian/Ubuntu with PHP5 is so easy to set up a site. I think the 
only thing that is missing from Debian for a PHP set up is an opcache. I 
usually need to compile APC from PECL.

I would love to use eAccelerator. But it doesn't really like PHP5 
objects very much. I know that it crashes on CiviCRM.

> *) 2007 will see PHP 6.0 released
> (http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/10/31/HNphproadmap_1.html) and I
> think this means PHP 4 will be EOL'd. Of the PHP5 line, I would
> consider only PHP5.1, as 5.0 is pretty old and broken in very
> interesting ways. Also note that 5.2 is already out.

This will be great to see. For all of my development I use PHP5.

> And what Drupal could do?
> 
> *) Drupal 6 could have PHP 4.4 as a minimum so that we can use
> Unicode properties in pregs and thus simplify search module for
> example.
> 
> *) Drupal 6 could begin to deprecate PHP4 with using PHP5 only
> functions , like array_diff_key , array_walk_recursive and such.
> These could be emulated by an include file. We would not use features
> that can't be emulated. With this technique we can have quicker and
> smaller code on PHP5 and still keep compatible with PHP4. We might
> need to talk to the guys who have written PEAR PHP Compat -- what
> they think of GPL'ing a part of that work? The problem is that some
> functions can be --easily-- emulated only in one way and I do not
> want to appear as if we stolen their code.
> 
> *) Drupal 7 could drop PHP4 compat alltogether. If we keep the six
> month schedule, this will be released around the end of 2007 and run
> in 2008, so I think it's time. Unless we begin to use some advanced
> OOP mojo of PHP5 it's very likely that with the compatibility include
> and some PECL extensions D7 would still run on PHP4 -- just it would
> not be supported. I had some list here of what I want to use in PHP5
> but I simply do not want this thread to divulge into that. Let's
> pretend we have an agreement that we know there are stuff exclusivel
> to PHP5 which we want.
> 
> So, what do you think of climbing the version ladder? Please, please
> try to be on topic, this will be hard enough without another lamer
> commenting "oh great, but when Drupal 5 will be out".

I think that this would be a good idea. Being able to use the latest and 
greatest versions of PHP will mean that we can start to use the new and 
better functions and improve how we do things.

Gordon.

> Regards
> 
> NK
> 
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