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Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2012 14:14:39 +0800
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Subject: Re: [VOTE] ext/mysql deprecation in 5.5
From: aharvey@php.net (Adam Harvey)

On 28 November 2012 14:03, Adam Harvey <aharvey@php.net> wrote:
<big snip, voting open, et cetera>

OK, so the first e-mail was the official announcement of voting being
open. I'd now like to quickly lay out why I voted yes, and why I think
it's the right way forward. Feel free to hit next if your mind is
already made up. :)

Ulf produced a blackly entertaining timeline of MySQL support in PHP
in one of the earlier RFC threads[0]. We've had better options than
ext/mysql available in mainline, stable releases since 2004, yet it's
taken a long time for there to be a serious push to encourage users to
use the newer extensions.

There are both a carrot and a stick here. The carrot is well laid out
by Ulf in his blog post[1] =E2=80=94 the newer extensions are more featuref=
ul,
faster, and in the case of PDO particularly, easier to use (and harder
to misuse). The stick is that we have this faintly ridiculous
situation where we have four extensions in php-src for accessing one
DBMS, one of which (ext/mysql) is barely maintained and has an API
that encourages poor programming practice.

Deprecating ext/mysql in PHP 5.5 doesn't mean it's going away
immediately. It doesn't even mean it's going away next year: there's
no reason at all we can't keep ext/mysql deprecated for more than one
release branch. In fact, that would be my preference. As others have
said: ext/mysql is a hugely used, popular extension. We can't rip it
out overnight, and nor should we.

Deprecation is a strong signal. It's a signal that it's time to update
tutorials. It's a signal to schedule upgrades for code when new
versions are written to use more modern APIs. It's a signal to those
of us who speak at conferences, and help people in various fora and
various ways that we should redouble our efforts to communicate the
benefits of MySQLi and/or PDO.

Most of all, it's a signal that we're serious about improving PHP and
encouraging our users to improve their own code with us.

Thanks for reading. If you got this far, I'll buy you the beer or
non-alcoholic substitute of your choice at any conference I'm at next
year. (Which, since I'm moving to Vancouver in the new year, may
actually be a few.)

Adam

[0] http://news.php.net/php.internals/63982
[1] http://blog.ulf-wendel.de/2012/php-mysql-why-to-upgrade-extmysql/