[geeklog-devel] Dropping support for PHP 4

[Dirk Haun]

We've talked about it before and I just opened an issue in the bugtracker[1] so we have it on record: It's about time we drop support for PHP 4.

This issue also came up in the now traditional meetup of the various CMS projects that take part in GSoC during the Mentor Summit: Most of the PHP-based CMS are still struggling to get rid of having to support PHP 4.

For the PHP developers and the PHP community at large, PHP 4 has been dead since 2007-12-31. The only reasons it is still around seem to be:

1) legacy applications that are "important" but won't work on PHP 5
2) some Linux distributions with long-term support that happened to be shipping PHP 4 when they were released

1) is not our problem. If Geeklog happens to be running on the same server as such a legacy application, I'm sure workarounds can be found to separate the two.

2) is more of a problem. There's a vocal minority[2] of users of such distributions that seem to be causing all this pain.

My suggestions is that we find out when support for those systems finally runs out (February 2012 seems to be one such date) and commit to providing security fixes for Geeklog 1.7.x until that date. That sounds like a long time and I don't want to hold off releasing a security fix just for the extra work that it takes to backport it. So I'd suggest we promise to provide "timely" fixes for such a legacy branch, i.e. ASAP but not necessarily on the same day as for the then-current version.

Opinions?

bye, Dirk

[1] http://project.geeklog.net/tracking/view.php?id=1217
[2] http://www.geeklog.net/comment.php?mode=view&cid=13965