* Chad <innocentkiller(a)gmail.com> [Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:59:49 -0500]:
On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 10:55 AM, Petr Bena
<benapetr(a)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