On 7/7/06, Gregory Szorc gregory.szorc@gmail.com wrote:
FUD, FUD, FUD, and more FUD. PHP devs went to great ends to make PHP 5 very compatible with PHP 4. Most PHP 4 scripts ran just fine under PHP 5 without any modifications. The scripts that needed modifications needed all but a few single-liners, which could easily be found via grep. 99% of scripts that needed a heavy-lifting to work with PHP 5 were not written well to begin with. If you want to talk about PHP upgrades breaking things, you should read the developer notes about PHP 6. They plan to turn off a lot of the support for legacy PHP 4. It is kind of scary, actually. I guess it's the price one pays when a language evolves.
Thanks, this is what I wanted to learn.
I'm hosting with service that only has 4, and MediaWiki is the first piece of software to (very suddenly!) demand PHP5. My initial impressions were .. disgusted to say the least.
That PHP4 is still usable within the PHP5 environment is good news, although it may mean very significant troubleshooting. Can PHP4 and PHP5 live happily together, so I can still run my original PHP4 scripts without worrying too much, and run MediaWiki under a PHP5 engine?
I can get 5 installed and help influence all sorts of stuff.. but I don't want to go through hell with various wierd PHP4 scripts that will need troubleshooting.
..
So it sounds like MediaWiki will be further improving itself by leaning on the advantages PHP5 offers over their previous PHP4 methods.