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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [VOTE] Integrating Zend Optimizer+ into the PHP distribution
From: lester@lsces.co.uk (Lester Caine)

Zeev Suraski wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> >From: Pierre Joye [mailto:pierre.php@gmail.com]
>> >Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2013 12:17 AM
>> >To: Rasmus Lerdorf
>> >Cc: Ferenc Kovacs; Zeev Suraski; PHP Developers Mailing List
>> >Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [VOTE] Integrating Zend Optimizer+ into the PHP
>> >distribution
>> >
>> >Now, about the yearly release, every single person I talked to love it
> and want us
>> >to keep with this cycle, as well as the more frequent bugs fixes
> releases. One
>> >thing we have to slightly change is to push too many new features in
> each of
>> >them, but we will get there.
> I'm not sure how many people you've spoken to and what their profile is,
> but reality shows a very different picture:
>
> 481004 PHP/5.2.17
>   280342 PHP/5.3.8
>   271156 PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny16
> 146342 PHP/5.2.9
>   133818 PHP/5.2.6
>   125550 PHP/5.3.10
>   109513 PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny13
>   106320 PHP/5.2.5
>   102412 PHP/5.2.14
>    81221 PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny9
>
> These are the top-10 most popular PHP 5.x versions out there.  PHP 5.4.x,
> in case you're wondering, shows up on the 44th place, with a bit over 20K
> deployments worldwide (5.4.11).
> With yearly release cycles, we may make the lives of a few users more
> enjoyable and with more rapid access to new features;  But for the vast
> majority, we're actually making lives worse:
>
> 1. Framework & app developers can't really rely on new features anyway,
> since nobody has those new versions installed.  Just two years ago -
> aiming for PHP 5.3 seemed like a bold move for ZF2 and Sf2 - and that's
> even though PHP 5.3 brought some revolutionary features to the mix (which
> 5.4 and 5.5 do not).  We've also heard the Wordpress way of thinking, and
> we can assume that it'd take many years before other apps feel comfortable
> requiring a higher version than 5.3.x as a prerequisite.
> 2. Users who want to stay secure have to constantly upgrade, since support
> lifetimes have been trimmed down substantially (effectively, 3 years from
> release;  and considering nobody upgrades on to an x.y.0 version, it's
> typically way less than that).  We can already project that based on the
> current frequency, people who install PHP 5.4 today will have less than
> two years-worth of lifetime before they're forced to upgrade, or be left
> unsupported.
> 3.  For the ecosystem in general, we're creating lots of fragmentation.
>
> All in all, I think the people who like the yearly release cycle are first
> and foremost bleeding edge individual developers, and not people who are a
> part of larger projects, or that actually have to worry about production
> apps working uninterrupted.

Finally some agreement with what I've been getting my head chewed off every time 
I bring it up! For the last couple of years ...

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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