All users of PHP, especially those using earlier PHP 5 releases are advised to upgrade to this release as soon as possible. This release also obsoletes the 5.1 branch of PHP. (emphasis mine)
It sends a slight chill down my spine when a minor release obsoletes an older, also minor, release.
What they’re saying here is: “We have tested this enough. Trust us with your valuable production server.” Of course a few days later you hear: “Oops, we made a little mistake there, please trust us with 5.2.1. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
And then everybody wonders why people move to Rails.
Comments (6)
It’s the second iteration of the 5 branch where 5.1 was meant to stay for sometime. The same way 5.1 added dramatic new stuff / features the 5.2 came strong as well.
Being it just the second iteration of a whole branch of a language, I find it cool to obsolete some of the functionalities. Aren’t you being a little over-sensitive?
Well that wasn’t a reason that would direct people to Rails, it was the weak community outreach of PHP and the lack of evangelized in the PHP community. It’s different now.
I can’t understand how can you obsolete new stuff that quickly? It’s only the second iteration.
The only dramatic change that I recall in the 4.x branch was turning off
register_globals. Compare that to what’s happening in 5.xI’m not talking about this from a single developer’s point of view. Major branches of any software should be as supported and unchanged as possible. Leads should ensure that an upgrade would cause as little headache as possible to sysadmins running 10+ boxes.
I just find “upgrade as soon as possible” and “obsoletes the previous version” ironic.
I might be wrong, but how is a sys-admin’s life supposed to be harder? He/She’s got to upgrade anyways, isn’t that their job? How is upgrading to the new version a pain?
The people affected are the code writers and the software that were written using 5.1 version. Which in their case if this iteration is better then they’ve got to upgrade and rewrite the code that was based on the obsolete part of the 5.1. Which is natural, I humbly guess.
After all, if code is well written, I don’t find it so hard to upgrade or rewrite a class that is effected.
The big question is how long would it take for communities and Framework projects to apply the new stuff! Check out how Zend Framework which is based on PHP5 would take that in effect. I guess these are the new indicators for the usage and implementation.
The 5.x branch affected 4.x people so severely that it took them almost a year to start considering the upgrade. If things keeping going at this pace—namely every minor upgrade obsoletes the previous version—nobody will be using the new features and they’ll only exist to satisfy PHP developers’ egos.
If you try to write PHP code that runs across every version, you’re getting yourself into a lot of headaches. And it only gets worse with newer, incompatible, versions.
I suppose it’s fine with most people to rewrite code when a new major version is released. But seriously, for minor versions, it’s just a shame.
PS. Java is an exception. The 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 series shouldn’t be considered minor upgrades; that’s how they named Java 5.
While I agree with you, I still have a doubt that people would write their apps to work on all the versions. It’s about the needs, I guess. Once you need to update, then you need to, it’s not like you’ve got to have it cross-platform all the time.
Again, I still see this a normal thing in every language’s life-cycle. Where is Wordpress? Textpattern? Or any community based software on PHP5? It’s just the way it is! Existing apps continue supporting their platforms until they have the need to shift over to the next version.
It was just a statement, a casual one if you please, I look at this and remember .Net framework when 1.0 came out and then 1.1 was a complete shift, and then 2.0 came out with dramatic changes, and it just kept on going on. Or remember Adobe Flash if you want! Actionscript 1.0 came out with weak typing and objects while it was still ECMA compliant, then came 2.0 and it squashed the 1.0, how about the flash-player?
Now the 5 branch, I take it as the 1.0 of the new PHP. So we still could give it a break.
The point is, although I see your point, I still find it natural!
I completely agree with you about PHP 5 being version 1.0 of the new PHP; in the same sense that PHP4 was the version 1.0 of the all-new PHP3. That is natural, but breaking the language at minor revisions is not.
The reason why WordPress, TextPattern and virtually all major PHP applications use PHP4 is that PHP5 was a huge break, and they need to support the majority, which unfortunately still runs PHP4.
It’s impractical for them to support every minor revision of the language, and PHP.net developers aren’t helping.
Anyway. I’m not saying breaking old habits is wrong, but breaking them so often is.