[wp-hackers] PHP compatibility

[Otto]

Oh, sweet Jebus, no. Rewriting the PHP files on the fly? I can just
imagine the incompatibility problems.

Look, we still have problems on a lot of hosts writing files for
plugin installation and for automated upgrades. If you start making it
actually create files as needed, you'll break it in tons of places.

So, until we can talk the-powers-that-commit into dropping PHP4, we're
probably stuck with this backwards type of solution.

-Otto
Sent from: Memphis Tennessee United States.


On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 9:46 AM, SoJ Web <sojweb at indiana.edu> wrote:
> Just a thought about PHP and MySQL compatibility for the future. There was
> some talk on trac ticket 8701 about the deprecated warnings that PHP 5 is
> throwing about assigning the return value of new by reference, and then,
> with PHP 5.3, magic quotes are deprecated, and in 6 will be removed (see
> trac ticket 9394).
>
> There was talk in 8701 about adjusting the error reporting levels to account
> for the warnings, but I think this not a suitable fix. If backwards
> compatibility is to be maintained, there will only be more and more of this
> to deal with. Personally, I would branch off at this point with a version of
> WordPress for PHP < 5, and continue development requiring v5 or higher. I
> don't know that many would agree with me on that, though, so I have another
> idea.
>
> It would be possible to read the user's configuration and rewrite certain
> core files to accommodate, using a method rather like IE's conditional code
> we use for loading IE version specific CSS. Any time in the code where there
> is break with compatibility between versions of PHP, you could put in
> conditional statements that would contain version appropriate code. During
> install (or update, or something similar), the file is read, the conditions
> checked, and the file rewritten with the conditions removed. If the file is,
> for whatever reason, not writable, it's just ignored, and acts as it would
> have otherwise.
>
> I've implemented a rough functionality to this effect, and it works pretty
> well (files are attached here http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/8701).
> The conditions are only checked during install, but could conceivably run as
> an update any time the configuration changed (much as the DB update wizard
> runs with the schema changes). What I've implemented also checks for MySQLi
> functionality, as that is what I'm using on my server.
>
> I realize this will complicate development, but complication in some form is
> unavoidable if backwards compatibility is to be maintained. Any thoughts on
> this approach?
>
>
> -Jeff Johnson
>
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