> I agree. I think it's especially a biggie for open source projects that > have wide adoption. If the community doesn't seem to want the new > versions, then new versions won't be created. And then people continue
> using hacks for > the features they need (e.g. unicode support). My big concern in creating > my current project in PHP 5 has been that there were many hosts that still > didn't support PHP 5 and I want it to be easy to find a host for it. I think this has been the biggest reason why PHP 5 has been slow to adoption. It's not so much that people want to stay with PHP 4 as it is they haven't been able to find a host that supports PHP 5. But we have to ask ourselves, why haven't the hosts upgraded to PHP 5? It is because, until just recently all of the Linux distributions still included PHP 4 by default. Really, what hosting provider is going to take the time to compile PHP from source when your OS distribution provides an RPM, even if it is an out of date RPM. I run a major open source project and that is the biggest headache for me: supporting both PHP 4 and PHP 5. I look forward to the death of PHP 4. On the other side of the coin, if you think about it, this actually shows that PHP has entered an era of accepted maturity in the business world. It means that businesses feel that PHP 4 is mature and see no reason to upgrade to PHP 5. You see the same thing in other mature technologies. For example, most of the Java business apps are still running J2EE 1.4 and many are still 1.3. As developers we like to code in the latest and greatest, but out IT friends just like to keep the ship from sinking. --John _______________________________________________ UPHPU mailing list [email protected] http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net
