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Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2021 16:32:16 +0200
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To: Matthew Weier O'Phinney <mweierophinney@gmail.com>,
 "G. P. B." <george.banyard@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] BC breaking changes in PHP 8.1
From: pierre-php@processus.org (Pierre)

Le 22/09/2021 à 16:24, Matthew Weier O'Phinney a écrit :
> On Wed, Sep 22, 2021 at 9:01 AM G. P. B. <george.banyard@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 22 Sept 2021 at 14:30, Matthew Weier O'Phinney <
>> mweierophinney@gmail.com> wrote:
> As somebody who's been contributing to and maintaining OSS libraries
> forever (since 2002), the pace of change of PHP is, frankly, ridiculous. I
> can keep up with patches. I can keep up with new features. But BC breaks
> EVERY YEAR just creates churn. I've spent most of the past 18 months doing
> nothing but ensuring libraries work on new PHP versions. I then get users
> angry that they aren't getting new features; if I don't update to the
> latest PHP version, I get other users angry they can't use the library on
> the newer PHP version. And with new PHP versions every year... I
> essentially have to update every 2-3 years regardless, and will lose users
> if I don't do it every year.
>
> Figure out what the BC breaks are going to be, and do them all at once.
> It's far easier for the ecosystem to adapt to a big drop of BC breaks every
> 3-5 years than it is every year.
>
> Again, I DO like the resource objects feature. But getting a few here and
> there over many minor releases is a lot of breakage to track and adapt to.
> And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Hello,

I fully understand your situation, but I want to mitigate, I do maintain 
a few OSS tools (and much more internal code where I work for) and I 
experienced those PHP upgrades as well (one project when from PHP 5.6 to 
7.4 and its platform code served as a basis for a new one using 8.0, for 
example, but I have many), and it never was such a pain. Laminas is a 
huge framework thought, so it seems more likely that you experience this 
pain*10 compared to me. Nevertheless, I have an opposite opinion, I 
think that until now, PHP has did an extremely good job in not making 
too much BC breaks, and keeping those BC breaks easy to deal with.

Regards,

--

Pierre