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Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 07:49:03 +0000
Organization: L.S.Caine Electronic Services
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To: Rasmus Lerdorf <rasmus@lerdorf.com>, internals@lists.php.net
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: PHP 5.1 (Or How to break tousands of apps out	there)
From: lester@lsces.co.uk (Lester Caine)

Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

> Pierre, I agree with you that it was a bad idea to turn on the stub date 
> class in the final release candidate giving people less than a week to 
> notice that we now conflict with a common pear class.  We get all the 
> breakage and none of the benefits and nobody had any time to prepare the 
> pear side of the house for this.  It also sucks that not a single pear 
> person tested the final RC and brought this up in the past week.  There 
> is plenty of blame to go around here.

Rasmus - the main problem here is that there is *TOO* much going on with 
PHP and while everything can be justified it is just adding to the *NON* 
take up of PHP5!

PHP5 needs a *STABLE* code base so we can convince people that PHP4 is 
dead and stop adding functionality to that. At the same time many of us 
need PHP6 *NOW* just for the Unicode stuff. There are too many cooks at 
the moment, so many of us who used to download a new version and run it 
have switched off. I do not plan to run 5.1 in production because I've 
only JUST got 5.0.5 stable and I don't want yet another round of 
tweaking hidden bugs ( I use my OWN date/time stuff ! ). I'll wait for 
PHP6 now before I switch again since PHP5.0.5 is stable for me !!! and 
if users want to use my code with the latest PHP4.4 they can fix the 
pigging bugs themselves :)

The one thing that needs to happen is a roadmap that actually plans a 
single stable code base that we can all use in production and that does 
not tread on everybody elses toes with every release. Has *NOBODY* 
learnt that "It was wrong so we fixed it" is only acceptable if there is 
a clean path to advising users how to fix things and not simply hide all 
the now broken code behind messages?

While plowing forward in an attempt to add lots of extra wiz bang 
features Microsoft like may seem essential, we end up with the same 
problems - how many people still use W95 ;)

Rather than work on a PHP4 fork, how about a means of converting PHP4 
code so it will work on PHP5, and when something needs fixing in PHP5 
check and warn rather than break? If you want more of us to test RC's 
you need to restore confidence that it's worth the effort :(

-- 
Lester Caine
-----------------------------
L.S.Caine Electronic Services
Treasurer - Firebird Foundation Inc.