[development] php4

[larry at garfieldtech.com]

Official position: Drupal 6 core runs on PHP 4.  Contribs are at their 
discretion to decide what they support.  Drupal 7 and its contribs will 
require PHP 5.2 or higher.

My personal position: The host in question will likely be deservedly out 
of business soon.  Seriously, PHP 5 is not hard to support.  It's been 3 
years since the developer community officially abandoned PHP 4 and 2 
since the PHP internals team did so.  PHP 4 is getting no security 
updates whatsoever, and there are known, documented security holes in it 
that will not be addressed.

If your client is too cheap to get a host that pays attention to the 
past 6 years and at least pretends to care about security, then frankly 
I'd question if they're too cheap to pay you for the work.  It's not 
like cheap PHP 5 hosts are hard to find.

--Larry Garfield

On 6/14/10 1:09 PM, Domenic Santangelo wrote:
> Hypothetically, if a client wanted you to build a Drupal site (complexity of say, 2, where 10 is economist.com) and they insisted on a specific host -- and this host only supports php4, what would you tell them? So far I've got,
>
> -Core will work but many contribs will not (filefield, date, ubercart, etc)
> -Prepare for added development time that you wouldn't have to otherwise pay for
> -???
>
> What would you say, hypothetically? Any official stance on php4 from d.o?
>
> Thanks,
> -D