[wp-hackers] Drop PHP4 support entirely?

[Charles]

>> Whoa there, I think this is just about resources for most of us.   
>> Supporting multiple major releases of PHP has a cost.
>
> OK - that was a little dramatic of me. But the "force a change"  
> attitude makes it feel implicitly political to me.

I can understand that.  I prefer to think of it as "leading a change".

> So I just meant to suggest that market bravado is not particularly
> WordPress's resonsibility.

I don't disagree.  Where we see things differently, I think, is that I don't
see a public commitment to the effect of "WordPress 3 will require PHP 5" as
bravado.

>From my POV, saying that "WordPress 3 will require PHP 5" is incredibly
conservative.  PHP 5 is already three years old, and nobody's talking about
killing a PHP 4-compatible WordPress 2.x.

Within some number of years WordPress will /have/ to require PHP 5, if just
for security updates.  In my opinion, it /is/ a failure of leadership* on
our part if we can't give infrastucture providers and users a year-long
heads-up that a requirements change is coming.

If we don't give enough advance notice, then the whole thing becomes a
self-fulfilling prophecy, and the WordPress project may in fact become
responsible for prematurely adding one or two years to widespread PHP 5
adoption, not to mention PHP 6 adoption.

-- Charles

*By "leadership", I don't mean any one person.  I mean us.