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Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 16:24:49 +0200
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To: Andi Gutmans <andi@zend.com>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] POSIX regex
From: mls@pooteeweet.org (Lukas Kahwe Smith)

Andi Gutmans wrote:
> Even in PHP 6 I am not sure it's a good idea. There are a huge amount of
> apps that use them and it'll be very hard for people to upgrade.
> Anyway, let's do some more research on that once we get closer to PHP 6
> and see what the migration path looks like. We'll have to check with a
> few popular apps + google code search :)
> No need to decide on that right now without having more info.

I disagree with this approach. The thing is that we need to get a clear 
message out ASAP. This all ties into topics like if we will have a 
unicode off/on switch or not. Delaying these decisions will hurt our 
userbase. We need to prepare them early.

IMHO we should use PHP6 as the clean up release. Drop unicode on/off 
switch, accept that the bulk of all code will need to be rewritten from 
scratch. The benefit will be that it will truely be cleaned up, people 
will still be able to leverage the bulk of their PHP programming 
background and they can enjoy the fastest possible unicode engine we can 
provide them.

PHP5 will be for the people that cannot make the jump. We will back port 
whatever we can reasonably get into PHP5. People will linger on PHP5, 
just as they are doing now with PHP4. So it goes. At least we will not 
punish the early adopters for those that are unwilling to move to the 
new version in the near future anyways.

At any rate .. the time is now to make a decision on what its gonna be. 
PHP6 with BC hacks or not.

regards,
Lukas