PHP4 End Of Life

Derick Rethans was first to raise the issue of EOL for PHP4. Siting the nice PHP5 and PHP 6 unicode semantics he called for a vote on the issue. The official announcement comes exactly three years since the release of PHP5. The final date for PHP4 will be 31-12-2007. This gives developers and web hosts six months to get their acts together on a migration path.

Mostly it was good news, with some having reservations regarding the adoption of PHP 5. However, by continuing support for PHP 4, the PHP development team would have four versions to maintain including devel. Others sited figures regarding PHP 5 adoption but most of these are un-official and showing PHP 5 adoption levels at about twenty percent. Other figures quoted showed almost sixty percent.

Security fixes would still be put in place on a case by case basis untill 08-08-08 should they be deemed serious enough. Rasmus Lerdrof piped in saying " don't really understand what dropping support means if we will still release security fixes. That's the mode we have been in for at least a year.. Of course new documentation will need to be provided for a migration path from PHP4->PHP6 as well as from PHP5.*