4 ms·

How many PHP websites still work, if they have been in unmaintained since 2005? Can you imagine how many bugs you can find in a 2005 WordPress site? Or PHPNuke?

kbenson 8y ago
Given CPAN started in 1999, you'd be talking about a PHP 4 project that was mostly finalized by 2005 (at which time PHP 5 had been out for around a year or so). You'd be insane to allow any level of external access to something running on PHP 4 without an insane level of isolation and hardening (and even it would still be a PITA to deal with in an ongoing basis). For the most part you can take any Perl 5 code written in the last 20 years and just swap out the interpreter for a new one, and your code will run more secure, more stably, and faster (the list of actual deprecations that require change is generally.very small, if anything). It's a double edged sword though, as that back-compat legacy is not easily discounted when a change is proposed that would make modern Perl better but break older Perl. It's one of the reason the language is slower to adopt features than many others.
- ahofmann 8y ago
  There is a german Provider (df.eu) with php4 to php 7.2 support. As a customer you can choose which version you want to use. I don't know why they still support down to version 4 but I never had a problem with their products.
  - kbenson 8y ago
    I would be very leery of trusting that PHP 4 was adequately patched (given the last PHP 4 versions was EOL almost a decade ago), for a number of reasons that don't just include df.eu's technical capability. It's just a much less likely to be looked at system, but that doesn't mean it's not rife with lots of exploits that newer techniques could quickly find, and I imagine that hosting company is generally just patching obvious and reported exploits in PHP 4 (hopefully!). Best case scenario there's an active fork of PHP 4 that some company is monetizing support for (which doesn't negate all the problems I mentioned, but helps a few). I imagine it's a meeting of groups that need to have some old PHP 4 app running, and a company willing to throw it on a VM and put a best effort into keeping it from becoming a script-kiddie cesspool. It's probably not even as bad as I make it sound as long as you don't need public access. Still, not a business I would want to be in...

kbenson 8y ago

Given CPAN started in 1999, you'd be talking about a PHP 4 project that was mostly finalized by 2005 (at which time PHP 5 had been out for around a year or so). You'd be insane to allow any level of external access to something running on PHP 4 without an insane level of isolation and hardening (and even it would still be a PITA to deal with in an ongoing basis). For the most part you can take any Perl 5 code written in the last 20 years and just swap out the interpreter for a new one, and your code will run more secure, more stably, and faster (the list of actual deprecations that require change is generally.very small, if anything). It's a double edged sword though, as that back-compat legacy is not easily discounted when a change is proposed that would make modern Perl better but break older Perl. It's one of the reason the language is slower to adopt features than many others.

ahofmann 8y ago
There is a german Provider (df.eu) with php4 to php 7.2 support. As a customer you can choose which version you want to use. I don't know why they still support down to version 4 but I never had a problem with their products.
- kbenson 8y ago
  I would be very leery of trusting that PHP 4 was adequately patched (given the last PHP 4 versions was EOL almost a decade ago), for a number of reasons that don't just include df.eu's technical capability. It's just a much less likely to be looked at system, but that doesn't mean it's not rife with lots of exploits that newer techniques could quickly find, and I imagine that hosting company is generally just patching obvious and reported exploits in PHP 4 (hopefully!). Best case scenario there's an active fork of PHP 4 that some company is monetizing support for (which doesn't negate all the problems I mentioned, but helps a few). I imagine it's a meeting of groups that need to have some old PHP 4 app running, and a company willing to throw it on a VM and put a best effort into keeping it from becoming a script-kiddie cesspool. It's probably not even as bad as I make it sound as long as you don't need public access. Still, not a business I would want to be in...