[development] Looking forward next year and PHP versions

[Greg Knaddison - GVS]

On 11/14/06, Larry Garfield <larry at garfieldtech.com> wrote:
> I don't think this is unreasonable.  While I appreciate shared hosts' concerns
> re backward compatibility, security patches are only happening on 4.4.x now
> for the PHP 4 branch.  4.3 is effectively unsupported by default.  (I'm
> personally rather surprised that Drupal doesn't already require 4.3.9 or
> 4.3.10 anyway, since those were stable and widely deployed for a long time.)

It's more than shared hosts - RHEL4 uses 4.3.9.  It still gets
security updates through the RH backports system and will continue to
for years to come.

EOL Schedule:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (version 4):
General Availability: Feb 15, 2005
Full Support (including hardware updates): Feb 15, 2005 -- Aug 31, 2007
Deployment Support: Sep 1, 2007 -- Feb 29, 2008
Maintenance Support: Mar 1, 2008 -- Feb 29, 2012
From: http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/

Hosts can upgrade to a newer version, but I think it's incorrect to
classify use of PHP4.3 as a "budget host" situation.  It's also an
"enterprise" situation.

As has been said, I think it is reasonable to look forward to dropping
PHP4.3 at the point where we see it's actual use falling.  Since I
have and support several sites on PHP4.3.9 with no intention to
upgrade my PHP until RH does, I have a strong interest in representing
the 40% of PHP users who are in my same boat and seeing compatibility
for at least a while longer.

Regards,
Greg