Sooo.
Here we are again, looking at PHP version bumps. Our current minimum version is 5.2.3, released in June 2009 (5.2.0 was November 2006).
I'm proposing to at least bump to version 5.3.0 (as the minimal), release back in June 2006. Though a higher point release would be acceptable if anyone knows of any blocking bugs that were fixed later in the release series. Obviously, we want to try and use a version that gives both developers benefits, without hopefully causing most administrators issues having to manually update PHP etc.
From terms of version availability, Ubuntu 10.04 (from April 2010) Lucid LTS
gives PHP Version 5.3.2 [1]. From the Wikimedia Foundations setup this means we are sufficiently ahead that no extra work would be needed looking to attempt to backport versions. And with 12.04 not long away (granted, we're not going to be immediately upgrading), which has 5.3.10 (current stable release) [2].
From the developers point of view, we get some extras such as Namespace
support, Late static binding among other useful features. I have already committed some code to our repo as part of AntiSpoof that now has a 5.3 minimal php version. I know there was support from other developers to make this version bump.
It would be nice to have this change for the 1.20 release cycle if there are no major reasons not to.
One step closer to 5.4.0 and buh-bye to register_globals and safe_mode!
Thanks
Sam