Comments on: Backward compatibilty and web host adoption of PHP 5

By: Professional PHP » Blog Archive » Of PHP References and Compatibility

Professional PHP » Blog Archive » Of PHP References and Compatibility — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 05:42:07 +0000

[...] Following up on the Backward compatibilty and web host adoption of PHP 5 post from two weeks ago, I got a pretty good education about the problem with taking a reference of $this. The best summary is in this bug report. [...]

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 01:30:55 +0000

If you mean talk as in bring it to people’s attention (say by filing a bug report, posting to internals and blogging about it) before the final release rather than bitch about it afterwards, yup, thats what I want to do.

By: Antony

Antony — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 22:11:09 +0000

>I’m afraid that there are probably other BC breaks in 5.1.
That means only that you need to start testing it before it gets out.
But I’m afraid that *nobody* of those people that talk about “slowing down”, “stuck”, “more BC breaks to come” etc. really care about it, most of them only want to talk.
Obviously PHP Group is unable to test RCs with each and every piece of existing software to check BC, so it’s time for you to start caring about *your code* and its status with the upcoming releases.

By: Pavel Chtchevaev

Pavel Chtchevaev — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 06:04:14 +0000

> The use of $x =& $this is illegal because you can then do $x = new
> foo(); and then you replace the current object, which you should
> not be allowed to do.

But i will never do $x = new foo();, that’s the problem! Why not throwing fatal when it actually happens?

By: Rowan

Rowan — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 20:11:48 +0000

BC breaks are not just OS problem, this is software reality, if you’ve ever been on a big software dev team when it comes time for a major version change of language/tools, stuff breaks *all* the time. Fact of life, get your change control processes in place, move on. I’ve seen it with Delphi and 3rd party apps, a team I worked on would test for months on a new version of delphi, quite a while after it was released, to make sure the entire code base would work, only then after changes etc made would it roll out to the entire team.

By: Damien Seguy

Damien Seguy — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 13:27:32 +0000

Nexen is now crediting about 4% of PHP 5, (here http://www.nexen.net/interview/index.php?id=50). I should have the october figures ready later this week.

I confirm that version evolution from 4.3.x to 4.3.x+1 gets usually 2 figure digits in a single month, while PHP 5 is still so low. PHP 5 is gaining very slowly everymonth.

By: Pierre

Pierre — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 12:11:12 +0000

I suppose you are talking about #34358. This bug has been reopened and assigned.

I agree that the error message is not that clear, but the problem ends in the same level as the one we had fixed in 5.0.5 or 4.4.0.

–Pierre

By: Emil Tamas

Emil Tamas — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 11:08:51 +0000

PHP 5 lost it’s momentum and will probably never catch it again (perhaps PHP6 will have it better) .
BC is something where OS sucks big time and commercial software rulez.

By: soenke

soenke — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 09:03:24 +0000

[3 Oct 10:22am CEST] dmitry@php.net

Fixed in CVS HEAD and PHP_5_1.

By: Derick

Derick — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 07:19:05 +0000

The use of $x =& $this is illegal because you can then do $x = new foo(); and then you replace the current object, which you should not be allowed to do.