On Mon, 30 May 2005, Zeev Suraski wrote: > At 12:00 30/05/2005, Lukas Smith wrote: > >Derick Rethans wrote: > > >Hi Dmitry, > > >On Thu, 26 May 2005, Dmitry Stogov wrote: > > > > > > >This patch breaks binary compatibility. > > > >It cannot be broken in 4.3.x tree, and that doesn't make sense to release > > > >4.4 just for this patch. > > > > > >You mean that they think that it doesn't make sense to fix PHP in cases > > >where it's totally broken? I think that's totally irresponsible behavior. > > >Thousands of people still use PHP 4 for good reasons. If you look correctly > > >through the bug database you'll find atleast 10 bugs related to strange > > >segfaults and some have been confirmed to be related to references that > > >crash PHP. > > >I think we should definitely put this in a PHP release, although the patch > > >doesn't fix all segfaults yet. > > >(Patch is at: > > >http://files.derickrethans.nl/patches/ze1-return-reference-20050429.diff.txt) > > > >I also agree that these issues need to be fixed inside the 4.x tree. What > >would be the motivation no to release a 4.4 to fix these issues? Beating > >users with a stick towards PHP 5? > > In my opinion we should probably not fix this at all in the 4.x tree, because > the hassle involved in starting a new 4.4 branch - breaking module > compatibility for everyone, confusing people (imagine Apache 1.4 coming out at > this point), etc. > If it was an issue that everyone and their dog was bumping into, then I may > have thought differently - but it's an issue that is rare enough, and can be > worked around. And those that really need it to be fixed - can use the patch. > > Does everyone else think that this issue warrants starting a new version > branch?
There are more issues besides this one. I still have segfaults here but did not have the time to make a short script out of it. I will do that very soon. You know just as well that nobody that runs PHP seriously wants to patch their version. We would have no more maintenence tasks, as we don't have to continue the 4.3 branch. People don't easily encounter it because of the Zend memory manager hiding stuff. The segfault is actually just a memory corruption which can cause other weird results too (like objects changing class on the fly). (Not that it is an excuse to do again, but) We've broken binary compatibility plenty of times in mini releases - it never was a significant problem before for PHP. Not fixing it is *not* an option. You fix something that's broken - you don't leave it broken. That's called responsibility. And no, switching to PHP 5 is not an option either. regards, Derick -- Derick Rethans http://derickrethans.nl | http://ez.no | http://xdebug.org -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
