So the title says it all, kinda …
For the next alpha release of PEAR that will happen in 2 – 4 weeks we’ll have a min dep of PHP 4.4 and 5.1.6, so basically excluding 5.0.0 – 5.1.5 Now why am I going to do that ?
As any decent PHP developer know, PHP 4 is dead so to at least stay in the latest PHP 4 release I decided it wouldn’t be worth the hassle to maintain support for 4.3 anymore (It’s also the case with PHP 4.4 but I kinda dislike abandoning people altogether) and well 5.0 nobody uses except for crazy people and everyone in the 5.1 series should be up to 5.1.6 anyway since RHEL uses that and most of the LTS distros out there.
So yeah I’m doing this so I don’t have to test on so many PHP versions as well as hopefully nudge users to upgrade their PHP if they wish to use PEAR anymore … kinda … a little known secret is that the installer still works fine on 4.3 and 5.0 – 5,1.5, you just need to do pear upgrade -f pear if you want to keep on using those old ugly PHP versions but be warned, I’ll bogus any reports that has those numbers and I can’t properly reproduce any of the newer versions of PHP.
Now some people might be wondering things like: why didn’t you put PHP 5+ dep and rewrite the damn installer to proper PHP bla bla bla bla, well we’re already doing that and it’s called Pyrus and will be PHP 5.3+, the work I’m doing on the PEAR installer is because people will take some time to upgrade from PEAR installer to Pyrus once Pyrus is stable so I think it’s important we try to maintain the old installer for a bit longer and to make that easier for us the PHP version reduction was important, for us and I believe the community.
I’m mostly making this post so people know about this beforehand and can react accordingly on their own servers when the time comes.
Also does anyone have a beef with me excluding those PHP versions ? :-) If so comment here or email me at helgi _at_ php _dot_ net and explain to me why that is.
Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson 