Comments on: PHP4 not available in Feisty

By: Eric TF Bat

Eric TF Bat — Fri, 11 May 2007 03:55:19 +0000

The key phrase here is “most big hosting companies are moving towards it”. Ask them, and they’ll tell you “yes, we plan to start a PHP5 beta program, any year now!”. The problem is that they do what their customers need, and they know the PHP maintainers are far too amateurish to produce a reliable upgrade path. Look at the mess when they randomly changed how reference passing worked in a minor point release of PHP4. If you were running a real commercial webhosting business, would you risk breaking every one of your customers’ websites by upgrading to an incompatible version of the language your customers are using? Especially when most PHP programmers are self-taught and couldn’t debug their own code to save themselves?

So no, PHP4 is not dead, and PHP5 is the biggest piece of vapourware since Duke Nukem Forever. This decision makes me bloody angry.

By: Corrado

Corrado — Thu, 10 May 2007 10:27:48 +0000

One can agree or disagree on including php4.

The automatic updater should:

1) keep into account the choice that has been made (stick with php4 or upgrade to php5) 2) be stable when released

we upgraded development machines, and the updater caused a total mess, half installing php5, breaking dependencies, forgetting to install some of the modules and of the components.

If in future you decide again to exclude versions of packages, please be sure the updater keeps that into account before releasing.

Best,

By: kbglob - tecnologia para geeks, no para tu mamá » PHP4 no más en Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:54:41 +0000

[...] Comenté sobre ésto ayer en mi blog en inglés, asi que hay varios comentarios interesantes ahi: http://beuno.com.ar/archives/14 [...]

By: Robert Devi

Robert Devi — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 11:30:11 +0000

Thanks for the warning.

I personally don’t have a choice about PHP4 since my company uses PHP4 on Solaris and I use my machine for development. Like it or not, not all developers are able to influence company policy.

@Sergey, thanks for pointing out that PHP 4.4.7 compiles. I need to compile PHP anyway to support Oracle so this isn’t that big a problem, but it is still a disappointment since the lack of support means that Feisty 1 might not compile PHP 4.4.7 and I’ll have no choice but to stick with it until my company changes.

By: Greg

Greg — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:43:52 +0000

As Rich said, the end of all upstream support for PHP4 appears to be Dec 31st 2007, while Feisty is being supported through 2008. That’d be a year of the package’s life that it would be unsupported by anyone except possibly ubuntu.

The upgrade path from php4 to php5 has some small compatibility issues, but a majority of the code you run into should work without trouble.

By: Jules

Jules — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 15:35:16 +0000

You could try a self-contained version instead. These are great for development and work on different platforms too.

I think that XAMPP has a Linux version.

Regards, J.

By: trollenlord

trollenlord — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 12:31:54 +0000

I agree. Move on. Remove php5 from the repos as well and move to Rails.

By: Rich Buggy

Rich Buggy — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 08:51:31 +0000

There’ll be no more PHP4 after this year. Everyone needs to get over it and move to PHP5.

By: Sergey

Sergey — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 06:59:14 +0000

Yes. It was a big surprise for me too, when I’ve upgraded my notebook till Feisty Fawn last weekend. But it isn’t not last surprise! PHP version 4.4.6 from http://www.php.net cannot be compiled on Ubuntu 7.04.
After all troubles I’ve installed PHP 4.4.7, Apache 2.0.59 and Mysql-5.0.37. They work quite fine.

By: Justin Bodeutsch

Justin Bodeutsch — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 06:17:38 +0000

I discovered this earlier today. I’m torn because I really want to upgrade my development machine to feisty, but my company is using php4. Does anyone know if there is a good way to install php4 on feisty?