[wp-hackers] PHP5 and WP Development

[Ryan Boren]

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 15:31 -0600, Alex King wrote:
> My feeling is that we should hold off until the majority of ISPs start 
> offering PHP 5. At that point, new development should be done on PHP 5 
> and users still on PHP 4 can use the last PHP 4 compatible version.

Yeah.  We need to determine when coding to php5 is worth the
inconvenience it will cause to users.  As it gains acceptance across
ISPs, it becomes less inconvenient.   A significant level of acceptance
probably won't happen until Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell/Suse, and
the other big distros that ISPs use have put out releases containing
php5.

Anyway, users don't care what the code looks like or whether php4 or
php5 runs that code.  They just know that the cool new release of
WordPress with that feature that they've been waiting for won't run on
their host.  And I don't think php5 branches or lots of runtime checks
are worthwhile.  So, as Alex says, let's hold off until php5 actually
has some marketshare.  It's not like we don't have plenty of things to
do.  Energy put into php5 would be better spent fixing bugs, writing
plugins, and polishing WordPress.  php5 isn't the product here;
WordPress is.  We're trying to market WordPress, and "Now only works
with php5 because programmers think it's cool" isn't exactly a selling
point.

Ryan

> On Aug 11, 2004, at 3:27 PM, Tor Bjornrud wrote:
> > What I'm trying to determine is if we're postponing these changes due 
> > to immaturity of the new libraries or lack of php5 acceptance to end 
> > users... all valid reasons.  Alternatively, will we immediately fork 
> > the code and maintain different trees to save on package size of files 
> > or maintain it all in one tree with version detection, giving those 
> > who do run php5 a better product?