[development] PHP5 going forward

[Larry Garfield]

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
> >
> > !DSPAM:1000,46539c9a107171804284693!


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