[csw-maintainers] new PHP maintainer needed

[Darin Perusich]

Philip Brown wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 02:49:22PM -0500, Ben Walton wrote:
>> Excerpts from Ihsan Dogan's message of Wed Dec 17 15:02:28 -0500 2008:
>>
>>> Therefore I would like to ask, if someone can take over this important
>>> package.
>> Also, what is the plan for php4.  As it's no longer supported upstream
>> (even for security patches, I understand), what are we to do with it?
>>
>> http://www.php.net/downloads.php#v4
> 
> Just leave it alone. it doesnt conflict with anything.
> if we had a generic "php" package, it should certainly be pointed to use
> php5 now.
> but we dont. so it's a moot point, in my opinion.

Why just leave it alone? While I don't believe I'm the right person to
bring this up, given I'm not a very active maintain, this not abandoning
old software is one of the short comings of how we release packages.
There is no way to gracefully remove old packages from the release
cycle. This could be easily accomplished if when we have a stable
release it was moved out of the stable/unstable directory structure and
into it's own little world of YYYY-MM/{i386/sparc}.

If this was how we did the releases it was be trivial to say, As of
stable release 2008-12 support for the php4, mysql4, etc. package is
being dropped. Then is someone wanted to use those version they could
point pkg-get at that repository. Given the current paradigm we can't
really remove old stuff from the software tree because someone MIGHT be
using it.

> I guess it might be nice if the two things that depend on it,
> dotproject and drupal, were updated to use php5 though.

I believe that version of drupal doesn't support php5, or it supports
only an early release. Another one of those instances where we're the
dependency of an OLD package is forcing us to keep other old clutter
within the software stack.

> Now, back to the more important issue...
> Who would like to maintain php5? :-)
> 


-- 
Darin Perusich
Unix Systems Administrator
Cognigen Corporation
395 Youngs Rd.
Williamsville, NY 14221
Phone: 716-633-3463
Email: darinper at cognigencorp.com