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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Voting periods
From: lists@rotorised.com (Ryan McCue)

Larry Garfield wrote:
> 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.

I agree completely personally, I think we need to push much harder for
it and that it would be possible to hit 5.4 by the end of the year.

I was however stating the WordPress party line which is that we don't
need 5.3+ and that we'll only push if we need to. I think it's a shame
personally, but that's what has been decided.

(In my own projects, I target 5.3+ for most projects, but 5.2+ for
projects which need wide deployment, such as SimplePie and Requests.)

> 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.)

Here's hoping that Drupal can lead that push with the major hosts. 5.2
on 66% of hosts is ridiculous, and I'm personally sick of having to
backport things to 5.2. GoPHP5 was a *fantastic* effort and benefited WP
immensely even if we weren't directly involved.

Most of the WordPress committers don't see much advantage with pushing
to 5.3 though, so it's doubtful that we'll lead that charge. (Late
static binding is probably the only thing that they would see as useful,
but WP doesn't use many static methods.)

----

This all said, the internal dynamics of the WordPress core developers
are always changing, and views are definitely becoming less
conservative. I don't think you'll see us targeting 5.4 any time soon,
but 5.3 is a possibility. I've been talking to a few contacts from the
big hosts in the WP space and it seems like they've all got 5.3
upgrading in the pipeline.

-- 
Ryan McCue
<http://ryanmccue.info/>