Today at 9:58am, Lonnie Olson said:
Wade Preston Shearer wrote:
Here's the crux of our problem: The sites work great as is. The clients
are happy. What reason do they have to pay for an upgrade that won't get
them any improvement? What reason do we have to eat the cost of an upgrade
to their site for free? What reason is there to risk a major upgrade and
any breakage that might go along with it when the existing stuff works
fine?
I agree. If it is a one-off custom website for a client, then, yes, there
is no reason to update it if it's running fine. If you are developing an
"application" though then I think that that is different.
But I think these one-off custom websites, which are frequently hosted
virtually, are the biggest cause of slow adoption rate.
I agree, they're definitely a big cause. But it's hard to blame them if
PHP5 doesn't give them a good reason to upgrade. Here at work we develop
new sites and maintain old ones every single day, and we've gone for years
without a compelling reason to install a PHP5 server. In fact, I'm very
glad I haven't so far, at least up until 5.2 came out, because there was
still a lot of upheaval within PHP5 I understand. We're in the process now
of getting PHP 5 set up here for our new work, but we're also keeping PHP4
around for sites that aren't compatible and would cost too much to
upgrade.
One good case for upgrading is tossing the upgrade costs in with other
improvements and changes to the site. In that case the cost of the
php4->php5 retrofit is smaller compared to the other costs they'll be
sinking into maintenance. But when they don't need any other changes,
there is no maintenance cost anyway.
Once the security patches for php4 stop flowing, and new vulnerabilities
continue to be found, php5 does offer something they'll want, and more
will tend to upgrade. But they'll still do it hesitantly I'd wager,
because they're being forced into choosing between two painful options:
live with security holes or endure a painful upgrade.
You also said, "The old saying "Don't fix it unless it's broke" doesn't
apply to programming, because the refusal to fix it will eventually
*cause* it to break." I disagree at least partly with that. If none of the
software changes (apache, php, mysql, web site, etc.) what reason would
there be for any of it to break? I've seen a lot of web sites that don't
break at all during upgrades within the PHP4 family, and can go for years
with no maintenance costs. It isn't practical to assume none of the
software will need to change, cause any piece of it may have a security
hole you want to fix, or a new feature you want to upgrade for.
When I do start upgrading sites to work with PHP5, I'm hoping that it
isn't as painful as I fear it might be. For the most part the work we do
has been very compatible with most of what I've heard about PHP5. For
example, usually there's not much reason to use OOP on our projects, so we
won't have to worry much about that in our upgrade. In a few places we've
reimplemented php5 functions in php4, checking if the function exists
first, and if not, declaring our own version. We've followed consistent
practices with regard to things like register_globals and magic_quotes, so
if changes are required, we can probably make them on many sites in the
exact same way, making it quicker to do. But at a busy time of year, the
idea of doing a bunch of upgrades when we have other things to work on
that are more valuable to the client, the upgrade still doesn't sound
pleasant.
If PHP6 is as painful to upgrade to as PHP5, they'll experience the same
thing all over again, with people avoiding the upgrade and getting
frustrated at all the extra pain they're going through because PHP decided
to switch directions again. I have heard that PHP6 doesn't break as much
stuff though, so hopefully that's not the case.
I would have been much happier if PHP5 was more backward compatible, and
added new functionality without breaking old functionality, and simply
deprecating it. Then in PHP6, they could remove the old stuff after people
had time to get used to the new stuff. If you want people to upgrade, you
need to make it as painless as possible, and as valuable as possible, or
people will hold out until the cost is lower, the value is higher, or the
cost of not upgrading gets too high to bear.
Anyway, it's a sad commentary that discussions like these are still
happening after 3 years. It is a real problem, and a big one, and I hope
the PHP team, as well as other open source projects, learn a whole lot
from the mistakes that were made this time, and don't repeat them.
Thanks,
Mac
--
Mac Newbold MNE - Mac Newbold Enterprises, LLC
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.macnewbold.com/
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