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Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2013 08:54:26 -0500
Message-ID: <CAJy+15z-Gixke_heE8s-Y7oP2zykpMNZSo3W593RAwQ4-TkN_w@mail.gmail.com>
To: Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com>
Cc: Pierre Joye <pierre.php@gmail.com>, Ferenc Kovacs <tyra3l@gmail.com>, 
	Rasmus Lerdorf <rasmus@lerdorf.com>, PHP Developers Mailing List <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [VOTE] Integrating Zend Optimizer+ into the PHP distribution
From: ilia@prohost.org (Ilia Alshanetsky)

Zeev has an excellent point here, my own research shows that 5.4, a
year after release had somewhere in the 2% adoption rate. The major
reason being is the lack of a stable, production ready op-code cache.
To release 5.5 without a good solution for that problem, would not
make the situation better, if anything it would make it very
intimidating to users to jump 2-3 versions directly to 5.6. Thus
leaving us with a massive user base running legacy, unsupported
versions containing unresolved bugs and vulnerabilities. Something,
which I don't think would be a very good thing for the future of PHP.

Ultimately, I think it is better to wait a month or two (if that is
what it takes) and have a solid release people can safely upgrade
their production environments to, rather than strictly adhere to a set
release cycle and delivery a partial solution.

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 5:21 AM, Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> 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.
>
> Zeev
>
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