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