On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 18:31,
<Guy.Baconniere@swisscom.com> wrote:
Even if the official support is gone you will still have "customers" who will
ask for PHP4 just because they have old scripts and they want to run them.
It's easy (even though it's painful) to deal with those customers. Just say "no", and make sure you do it several years in advance. Lose the customers that insist on using PHP 4. They will cost you more money to support than you earn from them, unless you're a small-scale operator with _huge_ fees.
And yes, the place I work did just that. We started by introducing PHP 5 as the default in 2005, thereby having a gradual decline in the number of PHP 4 customers in the following years. Since PHP 4 reached EOL, we hammered our customers with upgrade notices, and set a final date for December 31, 2009, and started the transition of the remaining three thousand individual customers on the first working days of the new year.
I admit that we were ruefully slow at forcing people over, if we'd started in 2008, we could have been done with it much earlier, the month after PHP 4 EOL.
Okay, we're not a big hosting provider, we're a small to medium-sized one, with merely a few tens of thousands of web hotels.
Many companies keep on running old applications for years and don't want to
invest money to re-develop everything from scratch to get the same functionnality.
These companies live in a fantasy world. As good as no software is supported indefinitely, even stuff on VMS.
The new developpement will also add additonal bugs and it will take months or
even years before reaching the same level of stability of the application.
PHP 5 wasn't really stable-ish until PHP 5.2.5, that's true. But by then, we (and you) had the chance of three years of experience with the full PHP 5 release, or four years counting pre-releases. But 5.2.5 was well over two years ago, and by then PHP 4's end-of-life had been announced months in advance.
All actively maintained PHP-based software has supported PHP 5 for several years already. The software that's not actively maintained is a continuing security nightmare.
The "years before reaching stability" excuse is a very, very bad excuse. But you know that. We all know that.
"Developers" and "Sales" want to push customers to adopt new products.
"Customers" would like to avoid investing more money for something already
working. Software development cycle, End of life of widespread products are
always subject to discussions (PHP 4 vs 5, MySQL 4 vs 5, Windows XP vs Vista, etc.).
" is not supported anymore since years " is familiar to me..
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=42416