Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:61871
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: error (pb1.pair.com: domain lsces.co.uk from 213.123.26.185 cause and error)
Message-ID: <50165078.40107@lsces.co.uk>
Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2012 10:14:32 +0100
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:13.0) Gecko/20120604 Firefox/13.0 SeaMonkey/2.10
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
References: <50163FAD.4020004@lsces.co.uk> <CADajX4AJx9PrschhEybQUU5UbgJj9h6biC-qyNjEhfb6Ke-8cg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CADajX4AJx9PrschhEybQUU5UbgJj9h6biC-qyNjEhfb6Ke-8cg@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Bringing users along ...
From: lester@lsces.co.uk (Lester Caine)

Adam Harvey wrote:
> 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.

I'm appealing here to the developers who use that information !!!!

The latest problem was with a 'TIKI' which stopped working after a 'security 
update', but the newer version did not bother to check that 5.3 was available 
and it messed up on the customers 5.2 setup. I've helped with several problems 
over the last few months, either down to PHP version changes or project changes 
that did not watch for what PHP version was running.

>> So what is the best way of getting the user base behind us using even PHP5.4
>> 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 — a lot of codebases seem to have
> been migrated from PHP 4 to 5 with little to no hassle.)

I'm still making sure that upgrades run on 5.2, but I've had to set up a 5.2, 
5.3 and 5.4 setups to make sure of that. The hassle at the moment is just silly 
little things that the developer could quite easily avoided if they also still 
considered the end users situation? When a users site goes down, THEY tend not 
to be competent enough to fix the problem ... and then saying 'you need to 
upgrade php' is even less helpful. Migration can be made hassle free, but WE 
need to make that happen! Some of the black holes created by PHP5.3 and 5.4 are 
well documented, but unless developers take the care to work around them sites 
go down, and then getting an ISP to fix the background installation is not 
necessarily easy.

> 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.

In hindsight PHP5.3 should have been labelled PHP6 and the 5.2 supported a 
little longer. 60% of the world still has the latest identified security 
problems in their installations :( It's Internals that decides when a version is 
dropped, but I don't think enough consideration was given this time to the end 
users?

( I'm looking again at another distribution since SUSE seems to in something of 
a mire at the moment :( But having used it since the late 90's ... )

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact
L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk
EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/
Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk
Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk