php4 end of life

[Drazen Gemic]

How long will PHP4 be supported ? When is PHP4 end of life scheduled ?

DG

[=?ISO-8859-2?Q?Oliver_Gr=E4tz?=]

Drazen Gemic schrieb:

How long will PHP4 be supported ? When is PHP4 end of life scheduled ?

Two answers:

1. As of yet no official end of life for PHP4 has been announced. For
the time being security fixes will be released for PHP4 as well as PHP5.
This is due to the widespread use of PHP4 installations.

2. PHP4 has already reached its end of life because no new features will
be available for the PHP4 branch. PHP5 is out already two and a half
years and it is recommended that ALL developers switch to PHP5.

And remember: It's a myth that PHP5 is incompatible to PHP4. There a far
more compatibility issues between 4.3 and 4.4 than between 4.4 and the
5.x versions.
OLLi

[Drazen Gemic]

Two answers:

And remember: It's a myth that PHP5 is incompatible to PHP4. There a far
more compatibility issues between 4.3 and 4.4 than between 4.4 and the
5.x versions.

I don't agree. If $a and $b are arrays or objects, then
$a=$b; produces different results in PHP5 and PHP4 respectively.

DG

[Rik]

On Sun, 18 Feb 2007 17:10:03 +0100, Drazen Gemic <tr*******@yaho o.com
wrote:

>Two answers:
And remember: It's a myth that PHP5 is incompatible to PHP4. There a far
more compatibility issues between 4.3 and 4.4 than between 4.4 and the
5.x versions.

I don't agree. If $a and $b are arrays or objects, then
$a=$b; produces different results in PHP5 and PHP4 respectively.

Arrays the same, objects are by default passed by reference indeed.
--
Rik Wasmus

[Kimmo Laine]

Drazen Gemic kirjoitti:

>Two answers:
And remember: It's a myth that PHP5 is incompatible to PHP4. There a far
more compatibility issues between 4.3 and 4.4 than between 4.4 and the
5.x versions.

I don't agree. If $a and $b are arrays or objects, then
$a=$b; produces different results in PHP5 and PHP4 respectively.

Oliver didn't claim that there are *no* incompatibility issues between 4
and 5 because there are and everybody knows that. All he meant was that
there are *less* of them between 4 and 5 than between 4.3 and 4.4.

--
"En ole paha ihminen, mutta omenat ovat elinkeinoni." -Perttu Sirviö
sp**@outolempi. net | Gedoon-S @ IRCnet | rot13(xv***@bhg byrzcv.arg)

[Drazen Gemic]

On Feb 18, 6:01 pm, Kimmo Laine <s...@outolempi .netwrote:

Oliver didn't claim that there are *no* incompatibility issues between 4
and 5 because there are and everybody knows that. All he meant was that
there are *less* of them between 4 and 5 than between 4.3 and 4.4.

Well, he also said that incompatibility is a myth. But, that was
not the question, anyway. Since we are chatting, I'll reveal why I am
asking it. It is a strange story, indeed.

I have a customer that refuses to upgrade application in a way that it
could
handle past years. They are cloning the database and the application
code and
use it as archive. Database name, username and password are defined in
a single
file, which makes that easy. To make things worse, archived versions
are mutually similar,
but not identical. They probably think that the solution is
cheap......

What am I trying to explain them is that they will have to upgrade
someday,
and I am not willing to upgrade unknown number of versions.

DG

[Jerry Stuckle]

Drazen Gemic wrote:

On Feb 18, 6:01 pm, Kimmo Laine <s...@outolempi .netwrote:

>Oliver didn't claim that there are *no* incompatibility issues between 4
and 5 because there are and everybody knows that. All he meant was that
there are *less* of them between 4 and 5 than between 4.3 and 4.4.

Well, he also said that incompatibility is a myth. But, that was
not the question, anyway. Since we are chatting, I'll reveal why I am
asking it. It is a strange story, indeed.

I have a customer that refuses to upgrade application in a way that it
could
handle past years. They are cloning the database and the application
code and
use it as archive. Database name, username and password are defined in
a single
file, which makes that easy. To make things worse, archived versions
are mutually similar,
but not identical. They probably think that the solution is
cheap......

What am I trying to explain them is that they will have to upgrade
someday,
and I am not willing to upgrade unknown number of versions.

DG

People who refuse to update are PITA's. The good thing is eventually
they will suffer from their stubbornness and stupidity. The bad thing is
often consultants get taken down with it.

The secret of being a successful is to make your recommendations - then
distance your self from their stupidity/stubbornness. And when they
suffer because of their decisions, you can become the hero by bailing
them out.

But trying to argue with them because of their stupidity/stubbornness is
a losing proposition from the start.

--
=============== ===
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
js*******@attgl obal.net
=============== ===

[Drazen Gemic]

But trying to argue with them because of their stupidity/stubbornness is

a losing proposition from the start.

I agree, no use trying to argue. I am going to offer them a creation
of spreadsheet
(Excel) document with the most important data. They will probably be
fine with that,
and probably willing to pay for it.

DG

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Oliver_Gr=E4tz?=]

Kimmo Laine schrieb:

Oliver didn't claim that there are *no* incompatibility issues between 4
and 5 because there are and everybody knows that. All he meant was that
there are *less* of them between 4 and 5 than between 4.3 and 4.4.

Exactly. The biggest chance in PHP regarding compatibility issues was
the bug fix that caused the "only variables can be passed by reference"
error messages. And this fix was deployed on PHP4 (4.4.0 I think) as
well as PHP5 (5.0.5 I think), causing a huge amount of applications to
break. People started to shout at the PHP devs to revert this change
because they didn't want to hear that this was the fix of a nasty bug
causing memory leaks AND they didn't realize that the previous
implementation could cause their applications to produce unexpected
results anytime.

In fact, getting your application past this problem i usually more work
than making it compatible with PHP5 afterwards. If you upgraded to 5.0.0
from 4.3.x than the same work arises when upgrading to 5.0.5 inside PHP5
but this problems are NOT PHP5 SPECIFIC.

As for the change from passing references instead of copies when
assigning objects: This is almost never a problem because if your
application used & to create references then this code works without
changes (with suboptimal speed but it works). Only if you ABSOLUTELY
depend on the two being independent instances after the assignment then
you run into problems.

OLLi

[=?ISO-8859-2?Q?Oliver_Gr=E4tz?=]

Drazen Gemic schrieb:

How long will PHP4 be supported ? When is PHP4 end of life scheduled ?

As a "barometer" of things to come you can use the nexen.net statistics
about the adoption of the different PHP versions:

http://www.nexen.net/chiffres_cles/phpversion/

You can see two things (Jan 2007):

1. PHP4 is still available on 85% of the
servers where PHP5 only reaches 14%.

2. PHP4 is declining, PHP5 is rising,
and both speeds are increasing.

Another point could be the figures for the downloads of the different
versions on the php.net mirrors. I don't know a source for them but the
PHP devs might think of an end-of-life for PHP4 when the count for PHP4
downloads per month sinks below a certain level.

OLLi