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Personally, I always wait at least one year before upgrading PHP. There are always segfault or security issues or odd problems in a 5.x.0 release. It's around 5

• lonnyk 14y ago
  >That said, I'm running 5.3 in production and have no real plans to upgrade to 5.4 anytime soon. May I ask: why not?
  • jcoby 14y ago
    There is no real compelling reason for me to upgrade. The short array syntax is nice but it's not worth spending a day or more interrupting everyone's dev environments and building packages and introducing (potential) instability into something that I live off of.
    • yogo 14y ago
      You build the packages yourself? Is there a special reason why you need to do this?
      • jcoby 14y ago
        Consistency. I use the system packages right now and Ubuntu does some tricks with the config that I'm used to.
        • brokenparser 14y ago
          Can you be more specific? If you want to see the patches go into the Debian/Ubuntu packages, run apt-get source php5 and look at the php5-$version/debian/patches directory. The build process uses a quilt wrapper (dh_quilt_patch) to apply them in the correct order. There are patches for building (in general or for a specific architecture), segmentation faults, security issues, manual pages and very few configuration changes (mostly just FHS compliance).
          • jcoby 14y ago
            That's pretty much exactly what I try to do. I grab the sources for the package and upgrade the underlying php version. I usually have to grab the PHP sources from a newer version of Ubuntu and modify it until it builds.
            • brokenparser 14y ago
              I've BTDT and it's tedious at times. Try this PPA: https://launchpad.net/~ondrej/+archive/php5 https://launchpad.net/~ondrej/+archive/php5 Fedora users have it easy, the packages there are mere days behind: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/php https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/php With a bit of experimenting you can easily do a network install of a headless Fedora/SL/CentOS in KVM using virt-install and a kickstart file. Use filesystem passthrough to access your source files, run php-fpm and configure its address as a backend in your web server. Keep SELinux enabled, but adjust it to your needs using setsebool if necessary.
              • jcoby 14y ago
                That first link looks like exactly what I need, thank you! I've tried Fedora in the past. I found it unstable and broken and I don't like RPM very much. It's undoubtedly improved since I last tried it (c. 2005-2006) but I don't miss RPM at all.
                • brokenparser 14y ago
                  RPM is fine, I'm more worried about Journald, Systemd and the like. The programs they replace are much more elegant and simple by design.
    • ihsw 14y ago
      CPU usage and memory consumption are cut by a third at worst and cut in half at best, personally I find that to be pretty compelling. It's a minor performance improvement but it's basically free.
• Joeri 14y ago
  Also on 5.3. I'm encoding my php files with zend guard, and they don't support php 5.4 yet, which is ironic given that it's zend.