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Reply-To: "Steph Fox" <steph@zend.com>
To: "internals" <internals@lists.php.net>
Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 11:50:13 +0100
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Subject: New flame
From: steph@zend.com ("Steph Fox")


Hi all,

I'd like to set the world on fire before disappearing off for the rest of 
the day, so bear with me :)

PHP 5.3 appears (to me at least) ready for release, give or take a bit of 
ironing. The only problem is the one of other-version compatibility, which 
really is a PHP 6 issue. We can't (well we can but it doesn't work well) 
future-proof our code with any certainty that we're doing so correctly. That 
goes for both internal code (where it matters slightly less in that it 
doesn't affect users) and userland code (where it matters a lot).

If you adapt userland code in PHP 5.3 to run under PHP 6, you lose back 
compatibility prior to PHP 5.2.1.

If this changes in PHP 6 after PHP 5.3 is released, ie PHP 6 is made more 
BC-friendly at too late a stage, there are likely to be an awful lot of 
users complaining about their wasted time re-writing code when they had to 
make a choice between FC and BC.

I therefore see tackling the BC issues in PHP 6 as a priority at this point 
for this reason. I know a handful of developers (Tony, Scott, Andrei to name 
the main movers at present) are ready to start working on HEAD again once 
its direction is settled, and I'm concerned it's all going to come too late 
to prevent a minor crisis of confidence.

So can we focus on 6 for a bit please? Like, make it Unicode-only and iron 
out the BC issues arising from that as far as is possible?

Thanks,

- Steph