Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:62478
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain ajf.me designates 64.22.89.133 as permitted sender)
Message-ID: <5038C0F8.9060008@ajf.me>
Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2012 13:11:36 +0100
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:14.0) Gecko/20120714 Thunderbird/14.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Lester Caine <lester@lsces.co.uk>
CC: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
References: <503897B4.8020303@lsces.co.uk> <CAH-PCH7XPDTxC5J=amh5Z4hYvWjC3+_TioVA=uztzmdkhnL_gw@mail.gmail.com> <CADyq6sL-qBxowHFh3E=_n710aww2Uf2Dzdb7tWGZSjkrvQmzsQ@mail.gmail.com> <5038C04D.9080509@lsces.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <5038C04D.9080509@lsces.co.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Older style frameworks ...
From: ajf@ajf.me (Andrew Faulds)

On 25/08/12 13:08, Lester Caine wrote:
> Marco Pivetta wrote:
>> Just wanted to remind you that the latest Smarty 2.x version is 
>> 2.6.26, released
>> in the middle of 2009...
> And our own version of Smarty2 has been maintained and updated several 
> times in the intervening period. It's a lot easier to fix security 
> holes as they are identified than going through several thousand 
> templates and updating them. But more difficult here is a change that 
> Smarty3 made which would require rewriting the whole way some 
> processes work in the framework :(
> DO we spend time rewriting everything again, or use what we have 
> working and carry on developing new facilities on that?
>
>> 3 years have passed by, and change is something that cannot really be 
>> stopped.
>> You can either freeze the environment and plan to re-build your 
>> projects or
>> maintain them, applying change as it comes, or maintain the older 
>> software
>> in-house (you will end up with something really hard to manage).
>> I can suggest you (at least it works for me) to use a continuous 
>> integration
>> environment/server and run your sites with a dependency manager like 
>> composer
>> (or something like an svn:external to a "latest" branch of the 
>> dependencies).
>> Running the "composer update" command, the version of the software 
>> used by my
>> projects gets automatically bumped to the latest available one, and 
>> then the CI
>> environment runs the tests. That doesn't ensure that 100% of 
>> everything will
>> work, but reduces the efforts needed to keep up with changes. This 
>> doesn't apply
>> to major version changes like Smarty 2.x -> Smarty 3.x, obviously, 
>> but I hope it
>> helps in reducing your workload while encouraging change and making 
>> it smoother.
>> As said by Ferenc, you cannot think of avoiding refactoring (at least 
>> without
>> freezing the project), that's part of our job.
>
> How about major versions changes like PHP5.2-3-4 in some ways they are 
> as bad as the Smarty changes. I still feel that while 'incremental' 
> changes have little effect on BC, the overall set of changes from 5.2 
> to 5.4 and now going on to 5.5 has resulted in a lot more areas that 
> need to be tidied up and often re-writen in sites that were probably 
> developed in PHP5.0 but work fine in 5.2. The vast majority of users 
> have not yet updated to 5.3, simply because their ISP's haven't, and 
> now we have 5.4 which ASSUMES that sites have been updated. We will 
> warn in 5.3 and remove in 5.4 only works if you do roll forward every 
> time :(
>
> Personally I'd avoided e_strict while I waited for some clean examples 
> of how the code should be done to appear ... they still haven't and 
> PHP5.4 came out and all the e_strict warnings became a problem. Run a 
> current joomla site on a stock 5.4 install ... it's unusable until you 
> disable all the new stuff. It took me a couple of days to get that 
> customers sites moved over and running again ... some still are only 
> holding pages ... now I need to find out why the remaining ones don't 
> work on PHP5.4 ... more work that I don't have time for :(
>
OK Lester, you've whined enough, what do you want us to do? Freeze 
development for 5 years so ISPs can slowly catch up, or something?

-- 
Andrew Faulds
http://ajf.me/