Posted by Manuel Lemos on 09/15/05 07:48

Hello,

on 09/14/2005 08:26 PM Oliver Grätz said the following:
>>>> In theory those are the only changes. In practice, besides the
>>>> officially admitted changes, there are also the bugs that were not yet
>>>> discovered or fixed.
>>> Examples? Links? More information on this? The fact is that on
>> http://bugs.php.net/
> A reference where _I_ have to search is something like a non-answer...

If you try searching the bug database for PHP 4 versus PHP 5 opened bug
reports you will get your answer.


>>> php.internals there are discussions to reduce the number of maintained
>>> development threads. In the not-so-far future they will reduce the
>>> manpower put into backporting bugfixes to the PHP4.x development branch
>>> since 5.x is the HEAD revision and everything is first fixed there. I
>>
>> In theory yes, in practice no. As a matter of fact PHP 4.4 was
>> introduced after PHP 5.0, although the "new version, new bugs" is the same.
> PHP 4.4.0 is dated 11-Jul-2005 and kind of a -break-stuff version (the
> reference notice). PHP 5.0.5 is a bit late here (05-Sep-2005) but it
> fixes about two times as many bugs AND inbetween there has been the RC1

In case it was not clear for you, what I am saying is not the matter is
PHP 4.x vs. PHP 5.x, but rather upgrading vs. not upgrading.


> of PHP 5.1. Speaking of releases it seems true that The 4.x branch is
> quicker but looking at php.internals one can see that the people there
> fix it in the HEAD revision and then complain about having to backport
> fixes to the other branches and they want to get rid of this by just
> backporting _serious_ fixes.

BTW, HEAD is PHP 6 now, not PHP 5.x anymore.



> >>think all "old" stuff is just as mature in PHP5 as you know it from PHP4
>>> and if some errors are found they are likely to be fixed more quickly
>>> for the 5.x release. The "new" stuff (that wasn't there before 5.0)
>>> almost certainly has more bugs since it's younger but that's no argument
>>> since this isn't relevant for old projects.
>
>> Right, that is why most people with old projects will not upgrade to PHP 5.
>
> I've got PHP5 and 4 running on the same machine.

I just do not get why you still run PHP 4 when you are so confident that
PHP 5 is the right version to use.



>>> [scratch vs reuse]
>> In theory yes, in practice nobody starts projects from scratch. Usually
>> you reuse class libraries that are proven and implement many basic
>> function. Many of those class libraries were built for PHP 4, not for
>> PHP 5. Some are complex and large. If you use them in PHP 5 with prior
>> certification chances are that you may stumble in PHP 5 bugs and
>> backwards incompatible changes that make such libraries not work
>> properly. Then even your new projects may be affected.
>
> First of all, in many cases code reuse still is a myth. I hate to say it
> but it's true. Then, a large potion of the PHP community hasn't even
> heard of PEAR. Then, people definitely start projects from scratch. If

You don't know if you have any numbers to back "the large portion of the
PHP community claim".

Anyway, as the developer of phpclasses.org, the largest PHP class
repository, I can inform you that the site has accumulated near 270,000
subscriber since 1999, of which at least half of them are considered
active as you may verify here:

http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/statistics/statistics.html

The site has 2,200 approved packages but only 71 are PHP 5 specific.

That is a lot of people reusing a lot of public class libraries!



> they didn't, there would be no PHPUnit2, Creole or Propel. And last but
> not least: Practically all PEAR stuff is written for PHP4 but does in
> fact work with PHP5 without problems. This is the case because the usual
> problems with PHP5 are almost never caused by real incompatibilities but
> by code that was wrong before (like those reference passing problems)
> and PHP5 is the language to report this as wrong.

You are assuming that I mean that class libraries are necessarily the
public ones.

Even if I just meant the public ones available on PEAR, here you can see
that there are 166 opened bug reports specific to PHP 5. Given this, it
is hard to back your claim that these public class libraries all work
well under PHP 5.

http://pear.php.net/bugs/search.php?cmd=display&status=Open&phpver=5


--

Regards,
Manuel Lemos

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