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

[Pierre Joye]

hi Clint,

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 12:36 AM, Clint Byrum <clint at ubuntu.com> 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.

Well, PHP 5.3 is the current stable, it is not like it is that old (3
years already tho').


> However, we do need to be able to support the release with updates.
> While 5.4 would probably mean more of those updates would be simple cherry
> picks from 5.4, it also means there would likely be a lot more of them,
> since 5.4.0 will undoubtedly be a more aggressive release than 5.3.9, and
> like any ".0" release, it just won't have the exposure that 5.3.x has had.

Well, things may change as we have now some stricter rules when it
comes to BC breaks and related areas.

> Also, we have 105 PHP applications in Ubuntu, 2 of which are in our "main"
> component (ganglia and nagios), which means they are supported by our
> security team and developers for the entire lifecycle of a release. Its
> not likely that we would be able to test all 105 of them with PHP 5.4
> before the release date, which may mean some of them will be quite broken,
> and also require stable release updates to fix.

If you can list the ones which have unit tests, then we should
definitively do test them now and here using php's snapshots. If your
team could get this list shortly, we can them share resources to setup
the automating testing. We already do that in our labs for a couple of
applications and php's unit tests. Frameworks are coming too.


> Now, all of that said, I would love to have 5.4 as the version in 12.04.
> Since 103 of the 105 apps are "community" supported, that means we'd
> need a large community effort to make sure this is doable.

Yes, and maybe the upstream teams of the respective apps would be
willing to help. But it is a huge communication effort and any help is
welcome. I'm working with some apps and  mainly with frameworks lately
(symfony being the most active here).

> Here's what would need to happen for 12.04 to ship with 5.4 instead of 5.3:
>
> 1) PHP needs to make a commitment to release very soon. Beta is fine
> for the first month or so of the cycle, but not more.

I would suggest to read the following RFC and todos:

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/releaseprocess
https://wiki.php.net/todo/php54

I would not expect to have 5.4.0 final out before end of december or
early next year. The rest is defined by the RFC. I think we can expect
more frequent releases than what we used to do, but smaller, which is
actually better.

> 2) App developers need to commit to testing their apps on the dev release
> of Ubuntu. If people are interested, I'd be happy to set up a jenkins
> instance somewhere and give people write access to a bzr/svn/git tree
> of tests to run daily on the dev release.

That's something we can try to work together, by contacting the
respective teams and get tests infrastructure together. The key is to
get the testing results as frequently as possible.



Thanks for coming to us to discuss this, it is very appreciated!

Cheers,
-- 
Pierre

@pierrejoye | http://blog.thepimp.net | http://www.libgd.org