PHP 5.2 Continued Support

[Tony]

We're evaluating changing our PHP setup in the near future to have PHP 5.2 support switched to either a secondary or removed entirely. There are more and more applications recommending or requiring PHP 5.3 As a result it's causing confusion for users as switching to PHP 5.3 seems to be an advanced topic even with our help entries on doing it. I'm wondering what everyone on the forum would like us to do. Feel free to vote on the poll and if you have any other comments add them to the topic. We're almost certainly going to remove PHP 5.2 as a primary PHP but if there is a lot of demand for it to remain as the primary we may change our mind on it.

[Unknown Bliss]

Why keep it as a secondary? BC for PHP versions is very very rarely hard-broken (it will just throw strict errors if you have display_errors set to true in your php.ini).

Scripts have minimum PHP requirements but they then should work for all future PHP versions.

There is no reason to keep an older version of PHP as a secondary. People have the view that upgrading PHP means scripts can break, but ultimately that doesn't happen. The only risk with running the latest major version of PHP is that if its recent <*.*.5 then it likely has some large(ish) bugs in.

Feel free to suggest a point why it makes sense to keep two PHP versions installed and I'll be willing to listen; but generally you should only ever need 1 PHP version (the latest major version that has 6 or over maintenance releases) installed.

If I'm honest the best thing might be to wait a few days and 5.4.7 will be released (they get released monthly and the last was 2012-08-16) then upgrade straight to 5.4 as your primary and not have a secondary. It would be the best and most productive use of your time and also shows that you provide good quality web hosting and stay up-to-date with software packages.

[President-Anonymous]

5.2 has a few known security bugs which are un-patchable .... Whatever patch you think you have in place... You don't. (lets not argue that, you just don't, it's not possible. period.)

I'd be very happy if you removed it completely.

I'd like to push the idea as suggested by Unknown Bliss and have only 5.4.x Which you do have as a 2nd .... But I'm sure you'd argue how some people still have older php programs which depend on 5.3.x (even though 5.5 is in development).

[Tony]

We have the capability to run multiple versions of PHP and our updating system makes it easy for us to patch all our systems at once. As far as running PHP 5.4 just not possible we've had customers want the latest and greatest many times in tickets and thus want to run PHP 5.4. Then they realize the software they run is not compatible with PHP 5.4. Also last time I checked zend guard does not support PHP 5.4 meaning users with software using that encoder would not work.

[President-Anonymous]

We have the capability to run multiple versions of PHP and our updating system makes it easy for us to patch all our systems at once. As far as running PHP 5.4 just not possible we've had customers want the latest and greatest many times in tickets and thus want to run PHP 5.4. Then they realize the software they run is not compatible with PHP 5.4. Also last time I checked zend guard does not support PHP 5.4 meaning users with software using that encoder would not work.

I'm happy with 5.4 .... Although I do wish you would update your version of it.

[Unknown Bliss]

Extensions are indeed a valid reason; but they won't hurry to update extensions if you just say "Oh we can just use 5.3". For 5.3 zend didn't release it for a year after 5.3 was released. Because of recent changes to the PHP Release Strategy; that means it is likely 5.5 will be out shortly after 5.4 has zend loader support.

[imkingdavid]

I voted for making 5.3 primary and removing 5.2 entirely, but actually, I think a better option would be making 5.4 primary with 5.3 as a secondary. Because the argument against 5.4 was script incompatibility, a solution would be to make 5.3 a secondary, which will allow users to downgrade their PHP as needed, while still having the most up-to-date version as the primary.

EDIT: But ultimately, I don't mind using .htaccess to specify the most recent major version or using the full path to the most recent PHP binary in the cron tasks, as long as that option is available to me. Sure, having 5.4 as the default/primary would be nice, but as long as I am able to use it, that's fine.

[iansltx]

As a web app dev who will be moving some (less demanding) clients to a reseller account soon...get rid of 5.2 and make 5.3 the default. There are a few things that 5.4 breaks to the point that it doesn't make sense for a web host to drop 5.3 support at this point...or make 5.4 the default...but 5.3 is widely used by customer apps (WordPress, Joomla, phpbb et al.) to the point that the costs of dropping 5.2 are outweighed by the benefits.