[development] PHP5 going forward

[Gordon Heydon]

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
> 
> !DSPAM:1000,46539c9a107171804284693!