On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 6:45 PM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:

On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 3:41 PM, Jeroen De Dauw jeroendedauw@gmail.comwrote:

...

Hey,

I'm wondering if there are any concrete plans for dropping PHP 5.2.x support in MediaWiki. Support for these versions of PHP has been discontinued by the PHP people a few months back, and it'll take another while before the next MediaWiki version (1.20) hits it's release anyway. So my vote goes for dropping support for pre 5.3 in MW 1.20, if not already planned. Then we can finally make use of the new things introduced in 5.3, which in some cases are really useful and right now a complete pain to implement.

Any objections or thoughts on this?

Our current deployment plan is to use the HipHop compiler in production for 1.19 (maybe?) and 1.20 (definitely). HipHop currently has no support for PHP 5.3-only features such as lambda functions.

So... we'll probably want to monitor that situation. :)

From what I understand, 5.3 support is working its way into HipHop (there's

a few outstanding pull requests relating to Namespaces, last I checked). Speaking more generally...

5.2 is still really common out there. The PHP user community is painfully slow at upgrading (remember the 4->5 migration?). I'd rather not break MediaWiki for all these sites because we want some new features--nice though they are. We just upgraded the minimum version to 5.2.x in the 1.17 release, so I don't imagine we'll bump it again probably for another release or two. At the very least, I'd like some stats on what distros are shipping 5.2.x vs. 5.3.x.

You're of course always allowed to use 5.3+ (heck, you can use 5.4alpha if you're feeling particularly bold) features in your own extensions if you'd like, just clearly mark them in the documentation so people don't wonder why it doesn't work with their otherwise working MW.

-Chad

On 16/08/11 11:38, Jay Ashworth wrote:

----- Original Message -----

...

From: "Chad" innocentkiller@gmail.com

...

5.2 is still really common out there. The PHP user community is painfully slow at upgrading (remember the 4->5 migration?). I'd rather not break MediaWiki for all these sites because we want some new features--nice though they are. We just upgraded the minimum version to 5.2.x in the 1.17 release, so I don't imagine we'll bump it again probably for another release or two. At the very least, I'd like some stats on what distros are shipping 5.2.x vs. 5.3.x.

Note that I just installed 1.17 on CentOS *5.6*, and the shipping PHP there is still 5.1.x; I had to set up epel to pull in something as new as 5.3.6 to get it to run at all.

I admit I was surprised that something as new as C5.6 didn't have a new enough PHP for our current production release, but there you have it.

CentOS 5.6 has PHP 5.3.3, but the package name is php53 not php. I might add something about this to mediawiki.org since it's come up a few times now.

-- Tim Starling

On 16 August 2011 02:38, Jay Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:

Note that I just installed 1.17 on CentOS *5.6*, and the shipping PHP there is still 5.1.x; I had to set up epel to pull in something as new as 5.3.6 to get it to run at all. I admit I was surprised that something as new as C5.6 didn't have a new enough PHP for our current production release, but there you have it.

Yeah, I got caught by this putting 1.17 on RHEL5. I ended up compiling PHP 5.3.6 from source just to generate a suitably up-to-date libphp5.so. In practical terms, RHEL and its derivatives these days is the old software graveyard Debian used to have a reputation for being.

I suppose the question is "what's on common cheap generic hosting these days?" The people using generic hosting will be the ones without the ability to upgrade without changing hosting company.

- d.