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Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2012 14:21:18 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Things move slowly in the real world ;)
From: johannes@schlueters.de (Johannes =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Schl=FCter?=)

On Tue, 2012-12-04 at 09:04 +0000, Lester Caine wrote:
> 
> 
> The move is to PHP5.4, but the interesting thing is that they are
> calling it 
> PHP6 simply to isolate it from PHP5.2
> http://faq.1and1.co.uk/scripting/php/5.html

well, the actual reason is that they offered the old PHP 6 before as
experimental and then simply swapped that for 5.3 back in the days and
since then have been lazy.

> I keep being told that 'It's just a number', but this is an example of
> why rolling yet another significantly different version of PHP5 causes
> problems in user land. The frameworks are jumping to the next major
> release to support 5.4 over 5.2 and providers like 1&1 need an easy
> way to manage what they PROVIDE to users. 

So how does a string matter? - We might also call it PHP 98 or PHP 2000
or PHP XP or whatever. What's the difference? Only that peopleare more
afraid.

Having difference between minor versions isn't new i.e. PHP 4.4 broke
many things due to the fixes in the reference handling there. Compared
to that the breakage between 5.2 and 5.3 or 5.3 and 5.4 is small. It is
especially small when comparing it with PHP 3 to PHP 4 (complete
reimplementation, changed behavior of include/require etc.) and PHP 4 to
PHP 5 (redone OO model, changing objects from being value types to
reference types)

johannes