Hi Thijs & list,
Thijs Kinkhorst schrieb:
I'm not a member of the development team, but I'm missing the most important thing here: what are the concrete gains??
As long as phpMyAdmin is expected to work on php 4, it has to be tested on php 4. Even if only a small patch is applied to the code, the developers have to ensure that it does not break the php 4 compatibility. Furthermore, old php versions may behave differently than the latest ones, so workarounds and compatibility code have to be written, which makes the code less maintainable.
This takes a lot of time. Time that could be used for real improvements.
On top of that, php 5 with its OO features allows to write code that is much more readable and maintainable. This would be a great advantage when reengineering parts of phpMyAdmin - which will definately be nessecary sooner or later.
The most concrete drawback is that it will be hurting those users who have no control over their host's PHP config
True, but honestly: if my webhoster did not offer php 5 by now, I'd be looking for a new one.
or have other reasons not to upgrade to PHP 5 yet.
It is possible to run php 4 and php 5 in paralell, so legacy applications that need php 4 may have php 4 while the rest is run under php 5. And if this is not an option, older versions of phpMyAdmin will still work - just like older versions of php. ;-)
And if you decide to move to PHP5 only, how will PHP4-bound users be security-supported?
This is something that needs to be worked out. As far as I can tell, this did not work well, when we dropped the php 3 support.
Regards,
Alexander