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Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2012 16:45:15 +0800
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To: Lester Caine <lester@lsces.co.uk>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Bringing users along ...
From: aharvey@php.net (Adam Harvey)

On 30 July 2012 16:02, Lester Caine <lester@lsces.co.uk> wrote:
> Moving people from 5.2 is probably going to be as bad as killing off PHP4
> and 4.6% of sites are still using that! But the main problem starting to
> happen now is that developers are upgrading projects to use 5.3 and 5.4
> features, but simply assuming that the user is working with the latest.
> 'Security warnings' get people to upgrade their own installs, but on top =
of
> a stack provided by their hosting company. Result ... sites stop working =
...
> please can developers take a little more care checking for compatibility,
> and at least warn if something will not work on earlier versions of PHP.

What, specifically, have you found that isn't covered in the release
notes and/or migration guide for PHP 5.3 and 5.4? Documentation bugs
would be awesome here. (Patches would be even more awesome.)

It's hard to improve this without detailed information, since the
migration guides feel reasonably complete at this point.

> Promoting PHP5.4 to the distributions should perhaps be done a little mor=
e?

What additional promotion do you have in mind?

> SUSE still does not have even an experimental version of 5.4, and the
> private build doesn't work with it's own apache 2.4 or the stock 2.2.

SUSE seem to be an outlier here: Fedora 17 has PHP 5.4, Ubuntu 12.10
will ship with 5.4, Debian testing and unstable have 5.4, FreeBSD has
5.4 in ports, and Arch has 5.4, to name but a few.

> If the distributions are not using 5.4 what chance is there of the ISP's
> switching?

Agreed, but as I said above, I think the distributions are using 5.4,
generally speaking.

> So what is the best way of getting the user base behind us using even PHP=
5.4
> so that any discussion of even more changes in PHP6 makes sense at all?

The same chicken and egg scenario once existed around PHP 5. The
community saw the merit in PHP 5 (5.2, specifically), and created
gophp5.org (now squatted, sadly) which was a rather successful
campaign to raise awareness of the issue, and ended with the situation
we're now in where most actively-developed frameworks and projects
require PHP 5.2 or 5.3 and use their features. (It's also worth
remembering that the BC concerns aren't as drastic for a lot of people
as they seem to be for you, Lester =E2=80=94 a lot of codebases seem to hav=
e
been migrated from PHP 4 to 5 with little to no hassle.)

So I think the answer, largely, is "build it and they will come".

I'm not claiming that our migration documentation or BC are perfect as
they stand. They can always be improved. But beyond documentation, I'm
not sure what else we can do from Internals, short of sticking a fork
in the language, calling it done, and never adding another feature.

Adam