[RFC|Merged] PHP 5.3.3 or more

[Ger]

I'd say bump it to 5.3.3 if needed. It saves the devs a lot of time and after all 5.3.3 is already 2½ years old. By the time 3.1 is released, you can safely ask to have at least the PHP version of ~3 years ago if they want a state of the art PHP application. When they can't run 5.3.3 they have the choice to either switch to another host or run 3.0.

EDIT: I was off by a year.

[Oleg]

You need to go through the popular linux distributions and find out who ships what version these days.

[MichaelC]

You need to go through the popular linux distributions and find out who ships what version these days.

We all read your post, you don't need to quote it.

Feel free. Don't say 'Please check popular distros', if you wish to contribute to the discussion with a point about popular distros, make your point, don't make someone else make it for you.

[DavidIQ]

Feel free. Don't say 'Please check popular distros', if you wish to contribute to the discussion with a point about popular distros, make your point, don't make someone else make it for you.

He wasn't the one that proposed this RFC so this is basically directed at IKD. Those creating RFCs are expected to do their due diligence, I'm sure you would agree.

[Ger]

You need to go through the popular linux distributions and find out who ships what version these days.

Is that really necessary? I mean, is it the responsibility of phpBB to support outdated distros?
As I said: PHP 5.3.3 is already 2½ years old and phpBB 3.1.0 will probably not be here the next few months. Do we need to slow down development simply because distros or hosting company's don't do their work?

[imkingdavid]

Short of downloading and installing a VM for each popular linux distribution to figure out each one's shipped PHP version (which is irrelevant because it can be manually upgraded fairly painlessly anyway), I'm not sure where to look. I've searched Google as well as the websites of Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu for a shipped PHP version and cannot find it.

One interesting statistic site I found is http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php/5.3/all which lists current statistics of usage by PHP version. You are welcome to browse it for research, but in short, of websites using PHP 5.3, the most use subversion of 5.3 is 5.3.3 (at 23%). Furthermore, only 8.1% of websites use a version of 5.3 that is below 5.3.3; the remaining 91.9% use 5.3.3 or higher.

On the PHP 5 page, 5.2 tops 5.3 drastically, but since we have already decided to use 5.3.2, that is obviously not a consideration.

Here are their statistic gathering methods; in brief, they use data from the top ~1 million websites to generate their charts, and it is updated daily.

I'm not sure why this RFC is so controversial; regardless of how many websites use it or what linux distributions ship it, long story short, phpBB 3.1 cannot be released until one of the following options occurs:
1. We increase the minimum PHP version number to 5.3.3 or higher.
2. We take the time to write all functionality currently supplied by our vendors because we can't bump up one maintenance release; as I have said, by the time we get around to doing that, 5.3.3 will be much more common and we could therefore, instead, use the components we are currently unable to use. In other words, this option makes no sense, but is unavoidable if we do not do option 1.
3. We decide to not include Events, Dependency injection, and Functional testing, as well as (potentially) the front Controller and the things it is blocking (revisions, et al). That also removes the ability to make extensions.

[MichaelC]

If Nils could post the current stats that would be helpful.

I think that as we are only bringing it up 1 maintenance release it isn't a massive change and I can't really see much reason to not update the requirement. This will need 3.0.12 released quite soon though (as soon as olympus migrations is done) to give them time before 3.1 hits gold (too late to give the public notification before alpha) and an announcement as soon as possible.

Draft Announcement:
[quote="phpBB 3.1 "Ascraeus" to require PHP 5.3.3"]
The next major release of phpBB, phpBB 3.1 "Ascraeus", will require PHP 5.3.3 or newer.

As per the previous announcement here we intended to introduce numerous components to phpBB and therefore announced the minimum requirement increase to PHP 5.3.2. However, unknown to our knowledge, Symfony had updated their minimum requirement shortly after and our code relies on code created since the requirement increase. Increasing the php requirement by one maintenance version will speed up the completion of phpBB 3.1 by reducing the amount of work that needs to be done significantly.

You can read the discussion leading to the decision.

All major distributions are already shipping PHP 5.3.3 or newer in their current stable versions.

phpBB 3.0 "Olympus" will continue to require PHP 4.3.3 as the minimum version and therefore supports PHP 5.2, 5.3.2 and 5.3.3.

Since PHP 5.3.2 is no longer maintained by PHP developers, all users not already running PHP 5.3.3 are strongly encouraged to move to PHP 5.3.3 or later.

Additionally, one should note that this announcement does not imply that phpBB 3.1 will see large portions of code rewritten in order to take advantage of new features in PHP 5.3.3. Instead, sections of code will be updated as needed in the 3.x release cycle.

Please discuss this announcement here.[/quote]

If there aren't any major objections then I'd suggest we announce it Wednesday?

[bantu]

Ubuntu 8.04 (Long Term Support) Hardy has PHP 5.2.4
Ubuntu 10.04 (Long Term Support) Lucid has PHP 5.3.2
Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric has PHP 5.3.6
Ubuntu 12.04 (Long Term Support) Precise has PHP 5.3.10
Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal has PHP 5.4.6
See http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=php5

Debian stable has PHP 5.3.3
Debian testing has PHP 5.4.4
See http://packages.debian.org/search?keywo ... ection=all

Gentoo has at least PHP 5.3.15 and PHP 5.4.6
See http://packages.gentoo.org/package/dev-lang/php

FreeBSD has PHP 5.3.18 and PHP 5.4.7
See http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?qu ... ektion=all

[imkingdavid]

Thanks Andreas, I'll keep those web pages in mind next time I need to research something like this; I just didn't know where to look before.

[bantu]

Thanks Andreas, I'll keep those web pages in mind next time I need to research something like this; I just didn't know where to look before.

For RedHat et al https://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopi ... 43#p234543 should be sufficient.

https://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopi ... 25#p234625 has the version stats for phpBB 3.0.8 and 3.0.10.