[php-maint] Plans for wheezy

[Thijs Kinkhorst]

On Sat, January 7, 2012 01:34, Lior Kaplan wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 12:57 AM, Raphael Geissert
> <geissert at debian.org>wrote:
>
>> * Ship 5.4.x
>> Requires: another transition, there's an ABI bump
>> We would need to prepare packages of 5.4 in experimental. The sooner the
>> better. The longer we can make it available for testing will help
>> stabilise
>> it. At least the preparations should be made. I haven't followed the
>> commits
>> for a few months now, so I don't know how the code is, quality-wise.
>> The request for mysqlnd comes again, and even though I don't really like
>> it,
>> we will probably have to make the switch soon.
>>
>
> I'm not updated about the wheezy timetables (or general expectation for
> it), but 5.4.0 is expected soon (RC5 was just released) and would probably
> have enough time to stabilize (mainly with 5.4.1 or 5.4.2) in order to
> make it safe for inclusion in a stable release.

I don't think we have to expect Wheezy freeze around the corner -
multiarch dpkg isn't uploaded yet and after that's uploaded there will be
a significant amount of time before the freeze can begin.

Of course some previewing in experimental would be fine, but you can't
expect too much testing to come from that. But leave it there for a week
or two as a first test, then upload to unstable I'd say.

Having latest upstream branch really helps in security support during
stable lifetime of PHP, I think.

> There's a bigger question of the PHP related ecology (e.g. the big CMS
> applications) which might be needing a migration or some updates to work
> smoothly with PHP 5.4.x. Of course, having 5.4 in experimental would help
> this transition. Examples could be SQLite changes (version 3 only) and
> removing register_globals.

We shouldn't have anything in the archive that depends on
register_globals, so this seems like a good thing to me.


Thijs