[TYPO3-core] PHP version requirement

[Jigal van Hemert]

Hi,

On 1-3-2013 11:41, Michael Stucki wrote:
> I am really wondering that nobody seems to care about this problem.

Huh?? There was a compatibility class created to fix the problems with 
class_aliases and parameter hints.

As Philip indicated a known problem is if old class names are 
specifically included on those old PHP versions instead of relying on 
the autoloader.
Several people looked into this and couldn't find a solution to 
circumvent this PHP bug.

> According to this source [1], Debian is the number one Linux based
> operating system on web servers. I don't think that we can simply ignore
> that.
>
> As Philipp mentioned already, Debian is backporting bugfixes into their
> version.

This backporting policy is the real cause to problems. Instead of 
updating to newer PHP version they try to backport all fixes and pretend 
it's still an older version.
Adding to the confusion is the fact that all backports are reviewed. 
Sorry, but I'm lost for words here.

We're now in the situation that some Linux distributions have a PHP 
"version" which is 5.3.3, but which include a lot, but maybe not all 
bugfixes of for example 5.3.9. There is no easy way to see what is fixed 
and what not. I'm sorry, but it doesn't sound like something we should 
support at all.

> So it seems like everything is fine and we can announce that Debian
> Squeeze is supported too.
>
> Any objections to this? If so, please tell me which bugs are yet
> missing, and I will check for these too.

I'm not taking the trouble to look for bugs that the Debian guys haven't 
backported yet. It looks that everything is fine, but if we missed one 
obscure bug which isn't backported yet and may not be backported at all 
for reasons only the Debian folks may know we are in the situation that 
we declared that we support this "version" and thus are obliged to fix 
the bugs that were caused by Debian.
Maybe *you* want to support it personally; I don't.

The situation with PHP is:
5.5.0 alpha 5 is out
5.4.12 is stable version
5.3.22 is old stable

Once 5.5 is released you can expect that support for 5.3.x will end soon.

-- 
Jigal van Hemert
TYPO3 Core Team member

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