On Fri, 06 Jul 2007 22:25:32 -0700, in php.internals ras...@lerdorf.com (Rasmus Lerdorf) wrote:

A bit more off-topic: A search for Beijing Olympics at Google gives Reporters sans frontières (Reporters Without Borders), www.rsf.org , as one of the first results. If they don't upgrade their PHP 4 installation it would create a great conspiracy theory :)

(of course, sites won't magically go black at that exact moment)

In general I really think every bit of help and information about the issue would be paramount. Both information about the motive for discontinuing support and practical information of how to test existing scripts with PHP 5.

Usually the PHP development does not bother with specific vendors, products, hosting companies or recommendations in general and so on. But if we really are up for it, it might have a pacific effect to put up some "known-good" lists; stuff like "Yes, phpbb does work with PHP5. Yes, your ISP does support PHP5. Yes, we can recommend tools to check for basic PHP5 compatibility. Yes, MySQL does work with PHP5". The hard part about this is that if the lists are just somewhat non-exhaustive people could be lead to think that all the stuff not mentioned is not compatible.

php -l might provide a basic indication of how much havoc an upgrade will cause. Even though php is downloadable as a shell executable for Windows as well I think that a bunch of the php developers still using PHP4 are not into command line administration themselves. Maybe creating a simple tool (perhaps graphic) to check for the 25 most common bc breaks as well as lint checks and with detailed information of what to do.

Basically when we tell users "You can't do that anymore" the obvious question from the users would be "But what would I have to do instead?".

I know the development of such a tool might be outside the scope of usual php development. But if we want to change the behaviour pattern of the users in the transitional phase it could be necessary.