[development] PHP version stats

[Konstantin Käfer]

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/