Re: Remove pre PHP 5.4 documentation

On 19.12.2019 at 00:24, Philip Olson wrote:

>> On Dec 17, 2019, at 8:15 AM, Christoph M. Becker <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> 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.

That makes sense, but would require even more manpower then just
dropping the respective documentation parts (also consider the
translations).

> 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?

I should have been more clear about that in the first place.  I was
actually referring to unbundled extensions which have been unmaintained
in PECL since then.

> 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.

Well, the suggestion was to remove *pre* PHP 5.4 documentation. :)

--
Christoph M. Becker