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
[1]
http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/php5
[2]
http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise/php5