[php-maint] [PHP-DEV] PHP 5.3.9 and is_a changes

[sean finney]

On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 03:36:04PM -0700, Clint Byrum wrote:
> I appreciate the sentiments of all who have weighed in on this, and I
> do want to make sure that we are paying attention to the greater PHP
> community's needs, not just Ubuntu's users. Shipping really old PHP
> versions is definitely not what we want to do.

At the same time, in 5 years I don't think 5.4 will be that much "newer"
feeling than a late 5.3 release, both will likely not be supported by
the PHP authors, and people will complain that it's out of date no
matter what.  So imo it's ultimately a matter of which version is more
stable and can be better supported by the package maintainers and security
teams in question.  I don't yet have an opinion on that, but would defer
to other members of the debian team if they did.

And note that just because it's the default/supported version does not mean
that those distro-users are left up the creek without a paddle.  Both ubuntu
and debian provide multiple avenues for stable/LTS users to get newer software
installed from backport/ppa type repositories, and they're also free to
install from source if those packages do not meet their needs.

> 4) We need it *at least* in Debian experimental, preferrably in
> Debian unstable.  I have not discussed this at all with the Debian PHP
> maintainers, so this is a big unknown. I've cc'd them for their comment.
> I do see that 5.4.0 beta is in experimental as of yesterday, so I suspect
> this will happen naturally.

I'm not sure we have a solid plan/timeline on this, but FYI if you sync'd the
last 5.3.x version from us the source package was slightly fubar'd (somehow
got turned into a native package).  We'll probably fix it with an epoch'd
upload or just wait until 5.4 is ready enough for unstable, but I don't think
we've decided on which yet.


	sean