[FLOW3-general] PHP Min requirements

[Jigal van Hemert]

Hi,

On 14-5-2012 11:47, Christian Kuhn wrote:
>  From an administrator point of view it is a real pleasure that stable
> version of distributions do not upgrade packages on the fly but backport
> security features instead. This makes it unlikely that an upgrade of the
> underlying system breaks the project running on top of it. This is why I
> love debian as a server distribution so much: Stable means no version
> upgrades, no exceptions. A security upgrade of debian stable never broke
> my systems for years now.

Very nice in theory, but it has drawbacks too:

- a version number in an package such as PHP doesn't mean anything in 
such a distribution any more. PHP5.2 is EOL for its authors at least. 
Linux distributions keep sticking to that version number even if it 
includes backports which might be incompatible with code.

- backports lag behind the fixes in the original package. Some time ago 
Olivier Dobberkau tweeted about voting for an issue in PHP with domain 
names which contained a dash. This was fixed in PHP 5.3.4 IIRC. At the 
time 5.3.8 was the current version, but a linux distribution still 
didn't include that fix.

- bugs may be reported for versions of a package which are caused by the 
distribution and not by the package. There was a thread about 
incompatible licenses of third party code included in TYPO3. It turned 
out that packages from at least one distribution didn't include one of 
those third party packages. This could lead to certain functionalities 
in TYPO3 which are not working as documented or not working at all. Such 
bugs can not be reproduced or it would take a lot of effort to find that 
it was caused by modifications of the original TYPO3 package.

It might be "nice" for an administrators, but I personally do not like 
this messing around with software packages others made. If you do not 
want to distribute upgraded versions, fine! Just report that the 
installed version is EOL, not supported or whatever and let the 
administrator decide about upgrading or not. The implications are 
his/her responsibility in that case.

-- 
Jigal van Hemert
TYPO3 Core Team member

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