Re: Drop support for PHP4

On Thu, March 15, 2012 20:53, Paul Lesniewski wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 3:53 AM, Fredrik Jervfors
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Hi.
>>
>> The fifth project goal states: "SquirrelMail will maintain an
>> architecture
>> that will flex to the needs of a variety of system administrators,
>> server
>> configurations, and web browsers while maintaining efficiency and
>> speed."
>> [1]
>>
>> It's this goal that has kept us at keeping support for PHP 4 for a long
>> time. Personally I don't want to bother with PHP 4 anymore and I don't
>> have any way to test my code for that platform. I haven't looked at all
>> distributions, but:
>>
>> The oldest version supported by the PHP team is 5.3.10. [2]
>> The oldest version in Debian is 5.2.6. [3]
>> The oldest version in Ubuntu is 5.2.4. [4]
>>
>> I wasn't able to find any recent reports about market shares, so I don't
>> know anything about versions in practical use.
>>
>> According to our documentation, we're supporting PHP 4.1.0. [5]
>> What should our supported version be? I'm personally voting for 5.2.4
>> unless anyone of you can find a major distro that has lower standards.
>> I don't get any good arguments here, I'm going to change all code I
>> touch
>> to PHP 5.2.
>>
>> Objections? Comments?
>
> Yes, I object.  RedHat still provides a version labeled 5.1.6 for
> RHEL5 (although it probably has a lot of newer patches, but it's still
> based on 5.1).  And there's still plenty of PHP4 installations out
> there I believe.  I find this proposal to be out of the blue and I
> can't see any good reason to compromise support of older versions
> unless you actually have some code you're working on where it is
> creating problems for you.  Even worse is to change the documentation
> to indicate that we don't support versions that we really do.
> Instead, I think it's better to talk about code problems that force
> this discussion upon us.

I can follow the argument for keeping PHP 5.1 support, but I do see the
merits of discontinuing PHP 4 support.

I see the following arguments for doing so:

- No-one or hardly no-one still uses PHP 4. That means in any case that
our code is hardly if at all tested against this. Therefore I'm not sure
if we can meaningfully 'claim' PHP 4 support. It's certainly not on par
with PHP 5 support.

- Coders don't have to consider PHP 4 during implementation, even if it's
just on details and not a major blocker for anything. If it makes things
easier or more efficient, that's a win.

- Supporting PHP 4 sends a bad signal to users that it's apparently
acceptable to run it. PHP4 has been EOL'ed 5 years ago and has been out of
security support for years now and I believe it's irresponsible to still
run it.

- I have a hard time to believe that there are serious amounts of installs
that don't upgrade PHP but that do upgrade SquirrelMail. Afterall, there's
only a problem on new releases. I reckon that those running PHP4 are the
ones that are prone to not upgrading anyway.

- "No-one else does it". SquirrelMail is one of the very few apps still
supporting PHP4. You may see that as a virtue, but really, it means that
if you want to run any other major PHP-based app in the same environment
you're going for PHP5 anyway. With major I mean such projects such as
drupal, wordpress, phpmyadmin, mediawiki and joomla.


Cheers,
Thijs


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