Michal Čihař schrieb: ??? yes, this is how i read it, rising PHP requirements to PHP 5.2.0 - breaking PHP 4 cmpatibility

On Thu, 14 Jun 2007 08:39:13 -0400 Marc Delisle <Marc.Delisle(a)cegepsherbrooke.qc.ca> wrote: Exactly ;-) -- Michal Čihař | http://cihar.com | http://blog.cihar.com

Sebastian Mendel a écrit : I don't detect any objections in your replies, so we "sign" to be part of this initiative? Marc

Hi Marc & list, I just noticed this interesting discussion and felt like joining it. I definitely support the idea of dropping php 4 support. phpMyAdmin has a manpower problem so getting rid of costly compatibility unmaintainable might be a step into the right direction. Marc Delisle schrieb: Compatibility drops like this should not be made often, otherwise you create many legacy versions the need to be maintained and security-patched. This is why I'd suggest that support for older MySQL branches should be dropped together with php 4. Current phpMyAdmin versions should support the full feature set of MySQL 3.23, 4.0 and 4.1. Users of those branches won't benefit much from future phpMyAdmin releases, imho. I know, that the idea of working with MySQL >=3D 5 only might sound a bit= exaggregated at first glace, but dropping support for older MySQL releases would make a lot of compatibility code obsolete. Dropping MySQL 3.23, supporting MySQL >=3D 4.0.12: * UNION and TRUNCATE may be used without checks. * Privileges introduces with 4.0 are supported by the server. According to MySQL, they do not offer any kind of support for 3.23 anymore, so why should we? Dropping MySQL 4.0, supporting MySQL >=3D 4.1.7: * The server supports recoding. All non-UTF-8 language files and all the recoding stuff may be dropped. * The server supports subselects. The 4.0 branch has reached its "end of product lifecycle" according to MySQL. Dropping MySQL 4.1, supporting MySQL >=3D 5.0.15: * information_schema can be used for queries on the structure. This is often much faster than the stuff we have to do in versions before 5.0 (for instance when calculation the statistics on the databases page). The old SHOW commands don't give us all the information we need in more recent MySQL versions - for instance we need to query information_schema if we want to distinguish between base tables and views. * We don't need a controluser anymore to query user privileges, information_schema provides the information we need. Like with 4.0, MySQL provides extended support for 4.1, but does not provide patches for it anymore. Furthermore, upgrading from 4.1 to 5.0 is really not that painful as it was when upgrading from 4.0 to 4.1. MySQL 5.0 is stable since October 2005 (v5.0.15), so I guess it should be safe to drop support for earlier versions in 2008. With MySQL, I see a similar problem as with php: webhosters for some reason stick with legacy versions (3.23 or 4.0). If you want to put pressure on them, you should not only do this with php, you should do it with MySQL as well. Regards, Alexander

On Thu, Jun 14, 2007 at 02:24:40PM +0200, Sebastian Mendel wrote: Drop MySQL-3.x sure, but please don't drop 4.0 for another 6 months or so. I still have some consulting customers (with paid MySQL support contracts) that are only jumping from 4.0 to 5.1 when Christmas comes. -- Robin Hugh Johnson E-Mail : robbat2(a)users.sourceforge.net GnuPG FP : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85

Robin H. Johnson schrieb: yes, isn't Christmas before 2008? -- Sebastian

Marc Delisle schrieb: block with phpMyAdmin release of 2008-02? warn in next releases of upcoming change if PHP or MySQL is below 5 of course

Sebastian Mendel a écrit : Good point.

Thijs Kinkhorst a écrit : Thanks Thijs for your feedback. - Coding without always having to stay compatible with PHP 4 (gains in terms of OOP, removing some dead code) - Because the PHP team will eventually stop to maintain PHP 4: avoiding to support our users who have PHP4-related problems We are talking about not releasing for PHP 4 our new-feature releases after 5 Feb 2008. Users who want to run the current phpMyAdmin version on PHP4 hosts will be able to; meanwhile they can put pressure on their hosts. And remember, this is part of a bigger movement that should convince providers to switch. Sorry I cannot produce such list of improvements for the moment. You are right, we will have to deal correctly with this; the stable phpMyAdmin version on 5 Feb 2008 will have to be maintained for some time.

Thijs Kinkhorst a écrit : Thijs, We have decided to go PHP 5. Thanks for your input. The exact steps we will do are still under discussion amongst the phpMyAdmin team and I'll discuss it also with other members of the "Go PHP5" coalition. We feel that the cycle where PHP dev team still has to support PHP 4 because providers still use it (because PHP dev team still supports it ...) needs to be broken. Marc

Hi Thijs & list, Thijs Kinkhorst schrieb: 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. True, but honestly: if my webhoster did not offer php 5 by now, I'd be looking for a new one. 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. ;-) 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