Re: Making "backwards compatibility" discussions more constructive
Nikita Popov wrote:
PS: I think that it would be nice to adjust the releaseprocess RFC to
clarify this point, to make things clearer for both contributors and
end-users. The current promise sounds a lot like "You can just update from
5.4 to 5.5 and won't need to make any code changes", but for any
non-trivial (legacy) codebase that's pretty far from the truth.
We have to face the facts here ... When I started writing PHP I could produce code that while written for PHP5 still worked on a PHP4 system. Today that is totally lost - and quite rightly - but even the idea that code written for 5.x will work on 5.x+1 neatly sidesteps the fact that code written for PHP5.2 will not run on the majority of PHP deployments today. YES we can configure a later PHP installation so that legacy code can run, but I would contend that no-one can create an installation today - in an ISP environment - which will allow legacy 5.2 applications to co exist with 5.3/4 applications! Which is why ISP's are having such a hard time moving their clients forward.
Added to this reality is the fact that the browser landscape has also moved on in a similar manor. While 5 years ago IE6 was the standard, how many of those applications will actually display on a modern browser? Yes they can be workable, but certainly not tidy to use.
I have been bashed every time I say that we need a major shift more often, but while most of the frameworks that use PHP are doing major overhauls every year with a major version as often as anually, PHP is still pretending that 10 year old code is compatible. This is simply not the case, so lets get rid of PHP5.6, get a clean sheet going for PHP6 and allow those of us who have real customers to support get everything up to a level playing field ready to look at a shift to PHP6 some time in the future. As yet even PHP5.5 is not on my own game plan.
--
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
Contact - http://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
Thread (16 messages)