Home / 2007 / July (Page 5)

RIP PHP4?

I suppose my earlier comment wasn’t exactly expansive, so I may as well elaborate. I’m not reporting any news by saying that the uptake of PHP5 hasn’t been explosive – over the past year, most of the big names in PHP-land have been commenting on it on mailing lists and elsewhere. The figures weren’t leaving much wiggle room either – 80/20 splits in favour of PHP4 were approximately what we were seeing.

Thing is, while backwards compatibility is a good thing in general, in specific cases like this one – well, it’s not that it’s not a good thing, it’s that it’s not really applicable. PHP4 and PHP5 are enormously different beasties and treating one as a slightly enhanced version of the other isn’t really valid.

Hence, goPHP5.org, the new movement amongst the dev community to push for PHP4 to be dropped from applications and for 5.2 to be made a requirement.… Read the rest

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X.org 7.2 memory leak

Sigh…

One of the things I really like about the Ubuntu family of distributions is that you get a good solid chunk of the stability you see in stock Debian Stable installations, but with the release cycle being so much faster, you get more up to date apps. Which is fine for a desktop to be honest. Let’s face it, for a server you want Debian (hell, for a *really* critical server you probably want OpenBSD); but for a desktop you just need it to run for ten to twelve hours between restarting X, and if you get a month’s uptime before a reboot, that’s perfectly acceptable (more time for either, is of course better, but those times are what you need, not what you want). And Ubuntu can do that and give you the cool bells and whistles to silence the iBook-and-Vista-wielding critics (Leopard, you say?… Read the rest

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