Things move slowly in the real world ;) View as Markdown

What a great way to confuse people.

Not sure if the date is significant, but just received notification that
1&1 will drop support for PHP4 and PHP5.2 from April 1, 2013 - yes PHP4 is
still available as their default!

The move is to PHP5.4, but the interesting thing is that they are calling
it PHP6 simply to isolate it from PHP5.2
http://faq.1and1.co.uk/**scripting/php/5.htmlhttp://faq.1and1.co.uk/scripting/php/5.html

I keep being told that 'It's just a number', but this is an example of why
rolling yet another significantly different version of PHP5 causes problems
in user land. The frameworks are jumping to the next major release to
support 5.4 over 5.2 and providers like 1&1 need an easy way to manage what
they PROVIDE to users.

--
Lester Caine - G8HFL

Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=**contacthttp://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact
L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk
EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/
Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk
Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.**uk<http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk

April 1, 2013

The date is somewhat suspicious ;)

The move is to PHP5.4, but the interesting thing is that they are
calling it
PHP6 simply to isolate it from PHP5.2
http://faq.1and1.co.uk/scripting/php/5.html

well, the actual reason is that they offered the old PHP 6 before as
experimental and then simply swapped that for 5.3 back in the days and
since then have been lazy.

I keep being told that 'It's just a number', but this is an example of
why rolling yet another significantly different version of PHP5 causes
problems in user land. The frameworks are jumping to the next major
release to support 5.4 over 5.2 and providers like 1&1 need an easy
way to manage what they PROVIDE to users.

So how does a string matter? - We might also call it PHP 98 or PHP 2000
or PHP XP or whatever. What's the difference? Only that peopleare more
afraid.

Having difference between minor versions isn't new i.e. PHP 4.4 broke
many things due to the fixes in the reference handling there. Compared
to that the breakage between 5.2 and 5.3 or 5.3 and 5.4 is small. It is
especially small when comparing it with PHP 3 to PHP 4 (complete
reimplementation, changed behavior of include/require etc.) and PHP 4 to
PHP 5 (redone OO model, changing objects from being value types to
reference types)

johannes

Lester, are you seriously suggesting we coddle providers who either

[a] Willfully misrepresent the PHP versioning system, showing they are
utterly tuned out of the PHP support community?

or

[b] Play unfunny practical jokes on their users and/or troll this very
list?

If anything, their behavior is a call for some official censure, IMO.
I have sympathy for their users, but the only cure for that is to find
a responsible provider.

If providers just told the truth about the "whys" of what they
support, instead of lying about stability, security, or other
"boldface" reasons, users would be better served. One such reason: "We
should have done this long ago, but held off longer than necessary for
budget reasons. Now, we're behind the curve and can't get new
customers who are version-aware. You'll enjoy the performance rewards
of re/building for the new version."

-- Sandy