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Comment by jcoby | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I always wait at least one year before upgrading PHP. There are always segfault or security issues or odd problems in a 5.x.0 release. It's around 5.x.4 that it becomes just stable enough to use.

About a month or two before I decide to upgrade I run the newer version locally while I'm developing (but being sure to not use any newer features). This usually weeds out any major incompatibilities and fix new warnings.

That said, I'm running 5.3 in production and have no real plans to upgrade to 5.4 anytime soon.

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>That said, I'm running 5.3 in production and have no real plans to upgrade to 5.4 anytime soon.

May I ask: why not?

There is no real compelling reason for me to upgrade. The short array syntax is nice but it's not worth spending a day or more interrupting everyone's dev environments and building packages and introducing (potential) instability into something that I live off of.

You build the packages yourself? Is there a special reason why you need to do this?

Consistency. I use the system packages right now and Ubuntu does some tricks with the config that I'm used to.

Can you be more specific?

If you want to see the patches go into the Debian/Ubuntu packages, run apt-get source php5 and look at the php5-$version/debian/patches directory. The build process uses a quilt wrapper (dh_quilt_patch) to apply them in the correct order. There are patches for building (in general or for a specific architecture), segmentation faults, security issues, manual pages and very few configuration changes (mostly just FHS compliance).

That's pretty much exactly what I try to do. I grab the sources for the package and upgrade the underlying php version. I usually have to grab the PHP sources from a newer version of Ubuntu and modify it until it builds.

I've BTDT and it's tedious at times. Try this PPA: https://launchpad.net/~ondrej/+archive/php5

Fedora users have it easy, the packages there are mere days behind: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/php

With a bit of experimenting you can easily do a network install of a headless Fedora/SL/CentOS in KVM using virt-install and a kickstart file. Use filesystem passthrough to access your source files, run php-fpm and configure its address as a backend in your web server. Keep SELinux enabled, but adjust it to your needs using setsebool if necessary.

That first link looks like exactly what I need, thank you!

I've tried Fedora in the past. I found it unstable and broken and I don't like RPM very much. It's undoubtedly improved since I last tried it (c. 2005-2006) but I don't miss RPM at all.

RPM is fine, I'm more worried about Journald, Systemd and the like. The programs they replace are much more elegant and simple by design.

CPU usage and memory consumption are cut by a third at worst and cut in half at best, personally I find that to be pretty compelling. It's a minor performance improvement but it's basically free.

Also on 5.3. I'm encoding my php files with zend guard, and they don't support php 5.4 yet, which is ironic given that it's zend.

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