On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 6:45 PM, Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com> wrote:
On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 3:41 PM, Jeroen De Dauw
<jeroendedauw(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
Hey,
I'm wondering if there are any concrete plans for dropping PHP 5.2.x
support
in MediaWiki. Support for these versions of PHP has been discontinued by
the
PHP people a few months back, and it'll take another while before the next
MediaWiki version (1.20) hits it's release anyway. So my vote goes for
dropping support for pre 5.3 in MW 1.20, if not already planned. Then we
can
finally make use of the new things introduced in 5.3, which in some cases
are really useful and right now a complete pain to implement.
Any objections or thoughts on this?
Our current deployment plan is to use the HipHop compiler in production for
1.19 (maybe?) and 1.20 (definitely). HipHop currently has no support for PHP
5.3-only features such as lambda functions.
So... we'll probably want to monitor that situation. :)
From what I understand, 5.3 support is working its way
into HipHop (there's
a few outstanding pull requests relating to Namespaces,
last I checked).
Speaking more generally...
5.2 is still really common out there. The PHP user community is painfully
slow at upgrading (remember the 4->5 migration?). I'd rather not break
MediaWiki for all these sites because we want some new features--nice
though they are. We just upgraded the minimum version to 5.2.x in the
1.17 release, so I don't imagine we'll bump it again probably for another
release or two. At the very least, I'd like some stats on what distros are
shipping 5.2.x vs. 5.3.x.
You're of course always allowed to use 5.3+ (heck, you can use 5.4alpha
if you're feeling particularly bold) features in your own extensions if you'd
like, just clearly mark them in the documentation so people don't wonder
why it doesn't work with their otherwise working MW.
-Chad