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Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2010 11:37:58 +0200
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To: Karoly Negyesi <karoly@negyesi.net>
Cc: internals@lists.php.net
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Please reconsider supporting PHP 5.2
From: pierre.php@gmail.com (Pierre Joye)

hi,

On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 11:17 AM, Karoly Negyesi <karoly@negyesi.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> A mere year after releasing Version 5.3.0 (Version 5.3.0 30-June-2009)
> you are dropping PHP 5.2 support.

We still support 5.2.

There is a huge misunderstanding of "end of active support". It means
that only critical bugs (security related) will be fixed in 5.2. It
does not mean that 5.2 is not supported anymore.

> 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.

Not sure about this one. Do you have an example please?

The BC breaks are listed here (required changes due to bugs or bad behaviors) :

http://php.net/manual/en/migration53.php

> Also, the deprecation of ereg will affect Drupal 6


Deprecation is only a message when and only when the error reporting
level is set to display deprecation messages. The deprecated functions
still work as before. Please see http://www.php.net/error_reporting

> Then there is the date_default_timezone_set / date.timezone snafu.

It is now required as nobody read the manual. Without it you simply
expect date/time features to work correctly while relying on random
timezone or none at all.

> 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.

5 years is not too fast. Also again, it is not EOL. Distributions will
also take care of back porting what they have to for their releases
lifetime. But we can't. We don't have the resource nor the time to
maintain minor releases for 10 years. It is also important to notice
that clean code running well with 5.2 will run just as fine with 5.3
as well (yes, clean is all relative but I hope you understand my point
:).

Cheers,
-- 
Pierre

@pierrejoye | http://blog.thepimp.net | http://www.libgd.org