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You know what, I agree. I wrote something to that effect in my post
from a few minutes ago. The vast userbase is mostly comprised of
people we hardly even get to see.

Sorry to chime in on this already long thread with my -negative-
commit karma, but I really want to show support for the extremely
sensible and considerate position of Zeev.

I tend to consider myself a not-so-average php user, not because of my
self-assessed superior coding skills, but because most of my
(ex)coworkers, both developers and sysadmins involved in web
applications, have zero interest in any of the php mailing lists,
conferences or similar.
They need to get a job done, have very limited resources for it and
absolutely no time at all to improve their knowledge. They use php
because 1-it's easy, 2-other ppl use it. They can read english, but
with some difficulties, so their main source of information is blogs
from the italian php community.
They might keep running applications on PHP 4.04 (pl1!!!) because the
original coder left the project years ago, and doing proper QA on an
application you have not written is a huge effort, and migration a
risk they cannot really even asses.

Now, I can sneer at them all I want, the fact remains that they are
part of the user base, and have no less rights than I do to get the
best solution that can be served to them.

And I do not think mindless BC breakage is a thing they like.

imho, a lesson to be learned from the slow transition to php5 is to
really focus on communication. The big changes were written on the
walls, but many small ones were not. And QA is needed almost
exclusively to catch the small ones (for the big ones, you have the
coder fix it upfront).
Some examples of things I stumbled upon include: objects not being
copied on assignment (it was really documented, in the cabinet after
the 'beware of the leopard' sign), *curl_version suddenly returning an
array instead of a string and others...

Of course most users will migrate only when they feel the need for it
anyway, but the more obstacles are put on their path, the slower the
adoption rate will be.

Keeping the 'unicode off' switch is a kind of double edged word: it
eases life for people developing for intranets (they can migrate to
php 6 with unicode off and be fine), but might backfire on
framework/library developers, that will have to code for two
environments...
Maybe the only solution is making it easier to run different versions
of php in parallel?

my .2euros
Gaetano