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Comment by 8n4vidtmkvmk | Hacker News Reader

I'm experiencing this with Laravel. I'm stuck on 5.2 while they're on v9 now because the author thought it would be a good idea to arbitrarily change some method signatures because he regretted his decisions earlier, while not providing any additional value and I don't have the time to hunt all these down and refactor everything, and I feel unmotivated when he's made it clear he's a bad steward. He refused semver for the longest time, not sure if they're using it now but even if so, 4 more major breaks is not encouraging

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That’s Laravel in a nutshell. I tried it for a year, then got fed up with all the useless name changes or directory layout changes after every “minor” (yeah, no SemVer) and moved to Symfony with their LTS promise. Still happy with that decision.

I’ve upgraded a large application all the way from 5.2 to 9. It does take a long while, but is well worth it in the end.

They provide an upgrade guide which is pretty comprehensive.

Im not saying it’s simple, but it certainly wasn’t as bad as I imagined it would be.

Good luck getting through it!

There is no reason to be stuck on a previous version of Laravel.

With the help of rector, it should be an afternoon's work to upgrade.

https://github.com/rectorphp/rector

I will be astonished if that works, especially with all the nonstandard junk I've done to my codebase, but I will give it a whirl. Thank you, didn't know about this. I did see a paid version of something similar before but never tried it.

I don't have the time to hunt all these down and refactor everything

Yes you do. You're just choosing to spend that time on other things rather than pay off some of the technical debt (that the framework introduced rather than you). Your decision to just live with the old version will prove to be a bad one in the long term: you'll find it frustrating, your skills will stagnate, new hires will find it frustrating (and will quit), eventually 5.2 will stop receiving patches so your security will be compromised, and you'll miss out on some of the shiny new features in the latest versions. This will get harder the longer you leave it.

It's worth investing the time to move with the framework even if the framework is a pain at times.

Sure. Every time someone says "I don't have time" they really mean "I'm prioritizing other things higher".

I don't have any employees yet =) And I do firmly believe launching a few more features is worth more than eliminating some tech debt.

Stuck on Zend Framework 1 :D

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