Re: Remove pre PHP 5.4 documentation

Howdy,

> On Dec 17, 2019, at 8:15 AM, Christoph M. Becker <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I propose to remove all pre PHP 5.4 documentation from the manual,
> basically like we did with pre PHP 5.0 docs years ago.  I don't think
> that there is much need to document the behavior of such old versions,
> and in my opinion, almost everybody (writers and readers alike) would be
> better off without these documentation parts.  We could also remove
> documentation regarding extensions which are unbundled as of PHP 5.4.0
> (e.g. ext/sqlite).
> 
> Thoughts?

IMHO it'd be okay to update inline documentation (e.g., "As of PHP 7.0.0, ...") 
and instead document 7+ as a first class citizen and then move (not remove) 
5.x specific stuff to the individual changelog sections, and also move critically 
important differences to notes.

The documentation is useful for refactoring/understanding older PHP 
code (there's a lot!) so having old and new information together is helpful. 
But I agree that a zillion inline version references gets messy so would
focus on fixing those starting today. 

As for removing unbundled extensions, what does that mean in relation
to PECL?

Lastly, I recently had the luxury of working on a CentOS box that had PHP 5.4 
as its current version; and learned this is EL 7's default PHP version. So,
there's also that.

Regards,
Philip