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The real problem here is that the chances of PHP 5.3 being used in production anytime soon are rather slim. "Stable" distros, like Debian, Red Hat and CentOS,

The real problem here is that the chances of PHP 5.3 being used in production anytime soon are rather slim. "Stable" distros, like Debian, Red Hat and CentOS, are still using PHP 5.1, which has long since been found to have issues that have been fixed and improved in PHP 5.2. Some hosts are still not even up to that level... For open-source projects like what I'm working on, our need to support a wide variety of hosting environments means that we took flack even just dropping compatibility for PHP 4 and 5.0. I would love to be able to start using some of the newer/better features arriving in 5.3, but sadly, PHP 6.1 will likely be out before I can ever start using those features in public projects... :(

apgwoz 18y ago
My employer tends tends to upgrade to the latest stable release of PHP, so when PHP 5.3 comes up, we'll be upgrading. Since I rarely use PHP outside of work, this still will be worthwhile for me. But, you're right. Significant changes in incremental releases like this makes it difficult for people to adopt, and I doubt that someone will bother backporting closures to a PHP 5.2.x release, like might be done in something like Python (from __future__ ... ) As for PHP 4 support, I thought that even Zend was done supporting it? Why is it still around?
- nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
  > "As for PHP 4 support, I thought that even Zend was done supporting it? Why is it still around?" Because there are still some applications and frameworks that do not support PHP4, either because no-one is working on them, or because certain incompatibilities between 4 and 5 would cause too much of the codebase to need to be rewritten. Sad but true.
chops 18y ago
Ubuntu comes with 5.2, so I'm assuming it'll adopt 5.3 rather quickly.
- nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
  Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn't represent the vast majority of production servers, because it's generally too bleeding edge. Production and hosting servers tend to stay on "tried and true" stable distributions, such as RHEL, CentOS, Debian, etc, regardless of how old the software versions contained.

apgwoz 18y ago

My employer tends tends to upgrade to the latest stable release of PHP, so when PHP 5.3 comes up, we'll be upgrading. Since I rarely use PHP outside of work, this still will be worthwhile for me. But, you're right. Significant changes in incremental releases like this makes it difficult for people to adopt, and I doubt that someone will bother backporting closures to a PHP 5.2.x release, like might be done in something like Python (from __future__ ... ) As for PHP 4 support, I thought that even Zend was done supporting it? Why is it still around?

nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
> "As for PHP 4 support, I thought that even Zend was done supporting it? Why is it still around?" Because there are still some applications and frameworks that do not support PHP4, either because no-one is working on them, or because certain incompatibilities between 4 and 5 would cause too much of the codebase to need to be rewritten. Sad but true.

chops 18y ago

Ubuntu comes with 5.2, so I'm assuming it'll adopt 5.3 rather quickly.

nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn't represent the vast majority of production servers, because it's generally too bleeding edge. Production and hosting servers tend to stay on "tried and true" stable distributions, such as RHEL, CentOS, Debian, etc, regardless of how old the software versions contained.