[Mediawiki-l] Discussion on MediaWiki and PHP5

Sy Ali sy1234 at gmail.com
Sat Jul 8 10:19:53 UTC 2006


On 7/7/06, Gregory Szorc <gregory.szorc at 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.



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