* Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com [Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:59:49 -0500]:
On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 10:55 AM, Petr Bena benapetr@gmail.com
wrote:
right, if I understand this, the problem is only with installer, so wouldn't it be better just to make some workaround for older
versions
of
php for installer rather than forcing user to upgrade, while it
actually
doesn't have effect on mediawiki which is already installed and
working?
We wouldn't be forcing anyone to upgrade unless they're attempting a fresh MediaWiki installation and using < 5.2.7.
And TBH: if we wait for CentOS to support 5.3, we'll be looking at 5.2 support for another 5 or 6 years. But we're not bumping to 5.3 support anyway, this is just a minor jump from 5.2.3 -> .7
It is probably even more worth to encourage upgrade to PHP 5.4: I've seen the benchmarks and it seems to run about 1.5-2 times faster and have memory footprint 2-3 times lower comparing to 5.3. Perhaps Tim Starling's discussion with PHP core developers encouraged them to improve Zend. Maybe even HipHop is not that much needed as PHP 5.4. The question is, how to encourage conservative package maintainers to push such package updates into their distributions. Because not everyone has root and even not everyone who have root are ready to compile from sources. I've seen few articles, especially about Ubuntu, that compiling is discouraged! Which is very strange, I remember it was encouraged back in late 90's early 2000's. Dmitriy