[TYPO3-core] PHP version requirement

[Michael Stucki]

Hi Jigal,

> 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.

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. Of course someone cared, which is great.
My comment was rather meant towards your suggestion to keep the 5.3.7
requirement (and therefore leave out Debian).

That is even worse as it seems there is no problem at all to use it...

> 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.

I would really like to investigate this, but as I already mentioned, I
couldn't find any notes about it in any of the mentioned versions:

http://php.net/releases/5_3_3.php
http://php.net/releases/5_3_4.php
http://php.net/releases/5_3_5.php
http://php.net/releases/5_3_6.php
http://php.net/releases/5_3_7.php

So either the problem was fixed before or someone needs to show me the
bug number for it.

> 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 are using the dotdeb packages for neos.typo3.org and I can tell you
there were several issues when something was broken after a simple
update. Steffen and Karsten can probably sing a nice song about it.
Exactly because of this, admins like Debian so much on their servers.

>> 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.

Sure I want as we use it in our company, just like many other companies.
Let me just refer to the following chart:
http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_details/os-linux

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

The next Debian release will be released soon, so that doesn't seem to
be a problem.

Greetings, Michael