Php 5.3

[a_bertrand]

As some of you knows, I'm using a server distribution called Cent-OS for my own servers. Cent-OS is nothing else than a Redhat Enterprise re-branded and made free. Now, why shall I use this? Simply, when you have a server what's extremely important is that you are able to run for a long period of time with basically just patches and nothing more. Therefore server distributions are well known to do not have the latest versions of the softs installed but on the other side, a usual support time is between 5 and 10 years where a desktop distribution do have about 6 month live.

Last week Cent-OS made an upgrade to version 5.6 (a little jump from 5.5), and one of the change is the possibility to install php 5.3 instead of the 5.1.x it was before. Keep in mind it's a possibility and you have both options available. I thought, ok let's take the road and upgrade to 5.3... What a mistake!

I never ever thought that jumping from 5.1 or 5.2 to 5.3 would have been so problematic. Basically none of the scripts I use do work on 5.3!

So, after carefully checking if I could not edit the PHP.INI file to make it work a bit more like 5.2 I decided to roll back and go back to my old 5.1.x installation.

How much does 5.3 change? WAY TOO MUCH in my opinion:

http://php.net/manual/en/migration53.deprecated.php

At first you may think, well, simply fix your code, however when it touches softs written by others and when you have over 100000 lines of code on your own, you may simply decide that switching to an "improved" version is not the best choice.

Just to give you an hint about how others do see the move:

http://forums.lifetype.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&p=45452

And yes I do use LifeType ;)

I would say it was a very bad choice of the PHP developers to not mark it as 6.0 instead of 5.3... as such a huge list of breaking changes make you wonder if you shall really invest that much time on such language.

[rulerofzu]

I run CentOS 5.5 servers with PHP 5.3 and have not had any issues with my scripts but my code is generally based at php 5 at that many lines of code id stay with 5.1 :D

How did you find the upgrade to CentOS 5.6 any issues?

[a_bertrand]

Upgrading to Cent-OS 5.6 was without troubles... simply I would not upgrade to PHP 5.3

For me it offers little to no advantage... and many drawbacks.