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Reply-To: "Steph Fox" <steph@zend.com>
To: "Andi Gutmans" <andi@zend.com>,
	"Antony Dovgal" <tony@daylessday.org>
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Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:54:29 -0000
Organization: Zend Technologies
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] why we must get rid of unicode.semantics switch ASAP
From: steph@zend.com ("Steph Fox")

Hi Andi,

> As we have discussed in the past the migration path may be extremely hard 
> moving from PHP 5 to PHP 6. Therefore the community has to come together 
> and really invest in the migration path more than we have in the past 
> (like we did from version 2 to 3). This means that during the development 
> process we do port applications to PHP 6 and make sure to capture that 
> process for our users. Preferably we can have automated migration scripts, 
> php.ini with defaults that allows for easy migration and well documented 
> migration steps.

We're still getting people through the idea of switching to PHP 5 from where 
I stand. There is plenty of time to think about stuff and etc. for PHP 6.

> Depending on how much pain we discover I think we should still agree to be 
> open to the idea that Unicode strings would be explicit (e.g. u"foo") as 
> opposed to the default (someone else mentioned it on this thread).

'Unicode strings would be explicit' is one thing, a Unicode mode that messes 
up existing code is quite another. So you're looking at keeping the support 
dual but changing the userland approach to it, did I hear you right?

> Obviously this would depend on what we find when we work on the migration 
> methodology as there's not enough input to make that judgment call today. 
> Also we will see a lot of pain when it comes to anything which is coming 
> in from the outside PHP so we may very well see changes in those areas as 
> the breakages become more apparent (e.g. file system, GPC ...).

Add to that 'Apache, ICU'. Speaking just from the doze build perspective, 
we're caught between a rock and a hard place there.

> Performance benchmarks may also come in handy as a data point for whether 
> we go down the explicit or implicit route for Unicode strings.

<deleted weird stuff />

> Net, net - I agree that the unicode semantics switch is going to bring 
> along more harm than good in the long term. Let's just not fool ourselves 
> with what we have to get done in order to make PHP 6 a success. Hopefully 
> a lot of the new active people on this list can step up and help the rest 
> of the core team both with porting functions to PHP 6 and also help with 
> the methodology.

So can it go away now please? It's the switch everybody definitely wants to 
lose, not the code itself. The code itself, the dev team probably won't want 
but the rest just might. (Opinion.) And as you mentioned earlier... until 
people try it out a bit, nobody can draw any sane conclusions with regard to 
its usefulness anyway. The biggest point is that The Switch actually has 
been tested and found wanting, even at this early stage. Read: it's too 
sudden and too soon for it to be implicit. (Opinion. Oh that's two. Guess 
I'm opinionated then. Or does that require eight?)

- Steph

> Andi
>