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To: Karoly Negyesi <karoly@negyesi.net>
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Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2010 14:25:12 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Major release for BC??
From: johannes@schlueters.de (Johannes =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Schl=FCter?=)

On Sat, 2010-11-27 at 03:50 -0800, Karoly Negyesi wrote:
> tl;dr the PHP developers have a false belief in not breaking backwards
> compatibility in minor releases. 

Besides from what Pierre said: There is a difference between the
language and the function library. The change in the language from PHP 3
to PHP 4 was big - even trivial things like "include" and "require"
hanged their behavior. From PHP 4 to PHP 5 the whole object model
changed. PHP 6  once was supposed to change the whole type system by
introducing a new default string type. These are the kinds of changes
demanding the version change as they affect each and every user and
demanding big changes to applications.

Yes even with minor releases we do allow language changes which have
some BC impact but that's quite manageable and should allow a quick
migration path (5.3 introduced "goto" and "namespace" as keyword which
broke applications using them, the next version will introduce a keyword
"traits")

With bug fix releases the language is stable.

Talking about the function library there is more change for multiple
reasons. We /try/ not to break anything in bug fix releases. Sometimes
trying is not enough. For one there are cases where there are big bugs
which demand being fixed while changing the behavior (we have little
choice for instance in areas related to security ...) and sometimes
there are oversights. We are human and PHP is complex and our tests
can't cover all use cases, there we can try to do our bust but still
depend on everybody testing their applications (did YOU test 5.2.15RC1
and 5.3.4RC1, yet?) and use cases.

johannes