----- 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.
Cheers, -- jra