Hi all,
I'd like to set the world on fire before disappearing off for the rest of the day, so bear with me :)
PHP 5.3 appears (to me at least) ready for release, give or take a bit of ironing. The only problem is the one of other-version compatibility, which really is a PHP 6 issue. We can't (well we can but it doesn't work well) future-proof our code with any certainty that we're doing so correctly. That goes for both internal code (where it matters slightly less in that it doesn't affect users) and userland code (where it matters a lot).
If you adapt userland code in PHP 5.3 to run under PHP 6, you lose back compatibility prior to PHP 5.2.1.
If this changes in PHP 6 after PHP 5.3 is released, ie PHP 6 is made more BC-friendly at too late a stage, there are likely to be an awful lot of users complaining about their wasted time re-writing code when they had to make a choice between FC and BC.
I therefore see tackling the BC issues in PHP 6 as a priority at this point for this reason. I know a handful of developers (Tony, Scott, Andrei to name the main movers at present) are ready to start working on HEAD again once its direction is settled, and I'm concerned it's all going to come too late to prevent a minor crisis of confidence.
So can we focus on 6 for a bit please? Like, make it Unicode-only and iron out the BC issues arising from that as far as is possible?
Thanks, - Steph -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
