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 <z...@zend.com> wrote: >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Pierre Joye [mailto:pierre....@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 > > -- > PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
