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Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2010 02:17:09 -0700
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Subject: Please reconsider supporting PHP 5.2
From: karoly@negyesi.net (Karoly Negyesi)

Hi,

A mere year after releasing Version 5.3.0 (Version 5.3.0 30-June-2009)
you are dropping PHP 5.2 support.

This is a very interesting decision as 5.3.0, compatibility wise, is a
major release. I always felt it was PHP 6.0 but it was not called so
because there was a development branched called that (which was later
abandoned).

Serious BC breaking changes include

Where previously the function would accept the by-value argument, a
fatal error is now emitted.

This broke Drupal 6 big time and while core has been fixed, contrib is
a bit slower to adapt. Previously, it was possible to pass in simply
NULL if you did not care about the by-reference argument.

Also, the deprecation of ereg will affect Drupal 6 over its lifetime
as the module install / enable functionality uses ereg in a way that
can't be fixed: as it is not on a performance critical code path noone
bothered to rewrite the truly ancient directory scanning function
which takes an ereg as it's argument earlier. And we can't break APIs
in a minor release so this can only change in Drupal 7 which is poised
to be released in a few months.

CakePHP had problems with PHP 5.3
http://i.justrealized.com/2009/08/16/cakephp-php-deprecated-error-warning/
and while I am not sure whether these problems got fixed or not, one
year is not a lot of time and so anyone happening to use older CakePHP
for whatever reasons is toast.

Joomla had its share of problems
http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomla/tracker/?action=TrackerItemEdit&tracker_item_id=17150
but they are fixed now, yes. I can repeat what I said about forcing
new versions.

Then there is the date_default_timezone_set / date.timezone snafu.

While as a Drupal core developer I am _so eager_ to use closures
finally I can't really endorse forcing everyone to switch to another
major version a mere two years after EOLing PHP4. That's fast... too
fast.

Kind regards

Karoly Negyesi

Disclaimer: this email only reflects my own personal opinion. Even if that.