[TYPO3-core] PHP version requirement

[Jigal van Hemert]

Hi,

On 4-3-2013 11:56, Ernesto Baschny [cron IT] wrote:
> just to clarify some aspects before the "Debian-bashing" goes on:

Sounds like you feel sorry for them ;-)

> All these *and much more* have been solved in Debian Squeeze already.
> There have been 10 updated PHP 5.3.3 Debian packages since. The API and
> it's feature set is since 2011 stable and can be relied on and there are
> no known security issues.

Here you see the main problem. From the point of view of Debian it's 
great that they have the same PHP version and it includes all the 
security fixes and loads of bugfixes which come from later versions of PHP.
Now from the point of view of the PHP coder: there is an annoying 
problem in 5.3.3. The best way to make sure that the installation 
doesn't suffer from the problem is to check somehow for the presence of 
the bug.
In case of the problem where domains with dashes failed to validate with 
filter_var() this can be done. If you use a correct domain with a dash 
and the check returns FALSE the installation has the bug.
In case of the include_once-with-old-script problem you may be able to 
detect the problem, but you cannot circumvent it. The only solution left 
is to set a minimum version for PHP.

Debian has decided to keep the version number of the PHP version which 
includes the bug.

We could add a note to the requirements saying that Debian Squeeze14 (or 
whatever it's called) and some other Linux distributions that backport 
bugfixes can work very well.

Still, if Debian (and others) didn't have such a confusing way of 
handling PHP in their distribution there wouldn't be any discussion 
about this.

-- 
Jigal van Hemert
TYPO3 Core Team member

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