[Phpmyadmin-devel] going to PHP 5-only

[cand. inf. Alexander M. Turek]

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:
>>
>> and drop MySQL 3.x and 4.0 support to?
>=20
> And I don't know about the market penetration for MySQL 3.x and 4.x. I =

> am in favor of dropping support for MySQL 3.x.

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

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