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Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 11:43:51 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] 5.4 Alpha?
From: johannes@php.net (Johannes =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Schl=FCter?=)

On Tue, 2010-08-10 at 17:25 +0800, Adam Harvey wrote:
> – The LTS branch is going to become more and more difficult to
> backport fixes to as it diverges from the other two branches, and I
> can see developers not bothering after a certain point, which may be
> counter productive.

Except for things like the Unicode branch our code base is quite stable
in most places.

> – Documenting how functionality changes from version to version in the
> manual is already a weak point, judging by some of the bugs and
> feedback we get: users don't always grok the version bylines and
> change log tables in the function reference as it is, and that's with
> a more closely aligned set of active branches. We might end up needing
> to rethink how we structure the manual by looking at something like
> the Python approach of having separate manuals for separate versions,
> which would require a not-insignificant amount of work.

In the LTS the functionality shouldn't change (having shorter cycles
even between other bug fix releases) Yes there are exceptions where a
needed bug fix has an effect, but documenting this should be solvable.

> – It might be hard to communicate why 5.4 (in the example you
> included) becomes end of lifed while 5.3 lives on. I guess that's no
> different to Ubuntu, though.

Better naming than simply "5.3", "5.4" ... might help. But should be
solvable.

> – Will downstream distributors want to ship non-LTS versions? This
> might actually reduce the amount of useful feedback we get for (again,
> using your example) 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6 releases, which might not be a
> great thing for the stability of the next LTS (6.0) release.

Distributors should be able to distribute two versions. Some do/did with
PHP 4 and PHP 5. And I prefer distributions offering the bug fix
releases for the LTS version over a heavily patched outdated 5.1.6 like
RedHat does.

johannes