Upgrade of PHP4

[Kevin Kinsey]

Olivier Nicole wrote:
> 
> Thanks, now that lads to the second question, what will I break when
> updating? What should I be carefull about? I have several servers,
> managing quite many sites, with a lot of home made pages...

I would perhaps do a "test build", and make notes of the steps for
the upgrade, to try and ward off "breakage" in the build/install
process.

Otherwise, PHP5 should be completely backwards compatible with PHP4,
with a few notable "switches" that have been adjusted.

One thing we noted was that the short tag (<?) was now deprecated*,
and there were lots of instances of it being used.  In particular,
the "short tag echo" construct:

   <foo html here <?=$bar ?> close html>

It wasn't too handy to have all those variables suddenly
disappear from the HTML forms.  OTOH, it's fairly trivial
to replace with some scripting work, IIRC.  But, that could
depend on the number of servers/sites, as you observe.

Kevin Kinsey

* "deprecated" might not be the right word; it's now OFF by default,
and I guess you can turn it on, but the possibility of conflict
with XML contraindicates that...
-- 
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"Well, SOMEbodys out to get me!
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