Re: Philosophical question

On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 1:58 AM, Bèrto ëd Sèra <berto(dot)d(dot)sera(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> My main problem with PHP is that it has loads of issues upon changing
> versions, there are a lot of applications based on it, and sooner or later
> you bump into having one application in need for one version and another
> being unable to run under it. And you obviously need them both. Gentoo will
> slot versions, so that you can run a number of them, but this is not a
> guarantee that you shall be able to slot minor versions, currently you can
> have any combination of:
>         (5.2)   [M]5.2.17
>         (5.3)   5.3.8 ~5.3.9_rc1 ~5.3.9_rc2
>         (5.4)   ~5.4.0_rc3
>
> This is large bouquet, but it does not mean that APC cache (for example)
> will work with all those versions, we had a number of issues with this.

I ran into a similar problem recently where Ubuntu refuses to upgrade
to the latest bug fix, and the bugs that remain unfixed are killer,
i.e. backends sig-11 dying upon trying to use memcache etc. Way back
in the day when I was building web servers on apache 1.2, postgres
6.5, and php 4.0.x, I was used to having to download source tarballs
and compiling everything by hand. I don't expect to have to do that
in 2011, but that's what I was looking at. OK, I was building my own
packages now for a farm but still, way more pain than I should have to
deal with.

Debian / Ubuntu will release an updated pg pacakge days after a new
postgresql minor version comes out, but php? It can be months or
years before a new minor version gets the go ahead. and like you
said, the fact that changing minor versions seems to break a lot of
stuff is the reason why.