Re: [SM-DEVEL] Moving to PHP 5 en masse

[Antoine Delignat-L. <an...@de...>]

Larry Garfield wrote :
>
> That tradeoff comes against PHP 5 right now only because so many web hosts 
> currently run PHP 4.  The incompatibilities between 4 and 5 are not that huge 
> if you've been writing clean code all along.  If you don't have legacy code 
> to worry about, then there's nothing holding you back from writing PHP 5 code 
> other than slow web hosts.
> ...
> But really, this thread is turning into a gripe fest about PHP 5 
> implementation details.  That's not what I wanted to be discussing here. :-)  
> Several projects are pushing to switch to PHP 5, for the increased speed if 
> nothing else.  There's no requirement that apps be completely rewritten to do 
> everything with a dozen classes and objects.  We believe there are benefits 
> to all PHP applications in participating in this effort, and the more 
> projects participate the greater the benefit.  That's why we are asking 
> Squirrelmail to join the effort.
>
>   
I'm not sure I understand your "effort" correctly. You actually want to 
encourage projects to break compatibility with PHP4 only to force 
hosting companies to switch to PHP5 ? No one doubts the benefits of the 
new features and improvements, but as far as SquirrelMail is concerned, 
minimal server requirements is among the guidelines of the project (or 
so I understand). SquirrelMail can run smoothly on PHP5, so I don't see 
the advantage there would be to drop PHP 4 support while the code is 
compatible only because Ruby and Python are gaining popularity.

Cheers,
Antoine