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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Voting periods
From: larry@garfieldtech.com (Larry Garfield)

On 01/28/2013 08:54 PM, Ryan McCue wrote:
> Zeev Suraski wrote:
>> The vast majority of the PHP community is a silent one;  These people
>> don't participate here on internals;  They don't attend conferences;  They
>> use it - the vast majority of them in a professional manner - and they
>> picked it because they like it the way it is, not because of what it needs
>> to become.  For every person that subscribes to internals, there's a
>> thousand (yes, a THOUSAND) people who don't (it's several thousands vs.~5
>> million).  In fact, they're not completely silent.  They speak in volumes
>> - PHP 5.4 is used in less than 1% of the sites using PHP today, and even
>> the relatively revolutionary 5.3 is still a lot less popular than 5.2.
>> The new shiny features are not all that interesting for most people.
> I'd like to speak to this as someone involved in WordPress development.
> As a whole, despite being a huge project with large amounts of
> developers and users, WordPress is pretty under-represented on
> php-internals.
>
> One of the big reasons for that is that we're stuck with a lot of
> backwards compatibility, both internal and external. We try hard to
> ensure that our API to our plugins doesn't break, which unfortunately
> has left us with being the go-to project for pointing out bad code. As
> much as some may want us to, we're not going to go and rewrite WP in a
> day to use new features, so internals discussions aren't that important
> at the moment.
>
> We're also stuck with a huge number of hosts still on PHP 5.2:
> http://wordpress.org/about/stats/
>
> I'd say it's somewhat of a chicken-and-egg problem, in that WP can't
> develop for what's not there, and hosts won't bother upgrading if they
> don't have to. We only stopped supporting PHP 4.x when the usage dropped
> below 10%, and I'd see the same occurring for 5.2.
>
Hi Ryan.  While I understand that level of conservatism, I think it is 
somewhat unfounded.  The PHP community at large decided to deprecate PHP 
4 en masse, and put hosts on notice.  It worked, too. The GoPHP5 project 
included over 100 projects and 200 hosts that collectively decided it 
was time to kill off PHP 4 and move to PHP 5.2.  That launched before 
the PHP Internals team decided to deprecate PHP 4 [1] , and had been in 
the works for a few months prior.  And that was even without the support 
of heavyweight Wordpress.

If Wordpress announced that it was going to start requiring PHP 5.3 as 
of some date 6+ months in the future (and there are advantages to doing 
so that don't require major BC breaking rewrites), I think you'd see a 
rather significant abandonment of PHP 5.2 among hosts. Many other major 
projects already have.  I would be rather surprised if Drupal 9 doesn't 
require PHP 5.4.  (Drupal 8, currently in development, is very solidly 
PHP 5.3.)

My point being, the chicken-and-egg problem IS resolvable.  PHP userland 
developers do have that power if wielded correctly.  We just need to 
wield it together.  We shouldn't let ourselves be pushed around by 
cheapskate fly-by-night hosts again.

Disclaimer: Yes, I was the lead organizer of GoPHP5, but not the sole 
supporter.

[1] Internals started discussing killing off PHP 4 about a week after 
GoPHP5 launched back in 2007.  Whether it was entirely coincidental or 
there was some causal relationship there is, I suppose, a mystery for 
the ages.

--Larry Garfield