Hello phpMyAdmin developers, how hard is the requirement for MySQL >= 5.5 in phpMyAdmin? Actually, I am the package maintainer of phpMyAdmin in Fedora and EPEL. EPEL is an add-on repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS (and other derivates). However, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is shipping only MySQL 5.1 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is only shipping MySQL 5.0. And unfortunately since the phpMyAdmin 4.2.3 release you are enforcing MySQL >= 5.5 as requirement - which breaks both of them. We could stay with phpMyAdmin 4.0.x for both, but 4.0.x goes EOL already in less than 6 months - quite early given that RHEL 6 is supported till 2020 (and RHEL 5 until end of March 2017). I do not expect that you support old releases same long like that. However it would be really helpful can give some details why the requirement is enforced and what could break with an older version (some specific features, mostly everything, everything?) of MySQL.

Thank you very much for your time already and hope to hear some details :) Greetings, Robert