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THIS... elebenty billion %. The breaking changes of PHP upgrades make the hosting life a nightmare. It's so easy in the vacuum of a single developer with a single application to think everyone should keep up to date, but the reality is most of the PHP sites on the internet are owned by non-technical people.

> It's so easy in the vacuum of a single developer with a single application to think everyone should keep up to date, but the reality is most of the PHP sites on the internet are owned by non-technical people

"Non-technical" people who don't plan for maintenance costs to their software (including maintenance to keep up with dependencies like PHP) don't get a ton of sympathy from me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> The jump from 5.6 to 7.x has enough breaking changes to make you cry.

It's not just PHP. But Python 2x / 3x as well.

Just to point something out: this is one reason why Java is so well liked for large enterprise code bases. They have been religious about backward compatibility in new versions.

A 2nd principle I would advocate is that if there must be a breaking change, it should be caught at compile time, not at run time. The project should fail to build, and the errors point you to exactly where the source code problems are.

Other language systems would do well to embrace backward compatibility and build time errors over run time errors. IMO.

> ... But Python 2x / 3x as well.

That was one of the lowest effort upgrades I ever did for my company (backend services, no front end websites).

One of the other reasons Java is popular in big companies is the low effort it requires to find people who can work with it.

> That was one of the lowest effort upgrades I ever did for my company (backend services, no front end websites).

If your application does a lot of ASCII/unicode/raw string and byte manipulation, the transition from Python 2 to 3 can be very cumbersome.

> But Python 2x / 3x as well.

But at least the python folks provided some tooling to bridge the gap between v2 and v3 such as backporting features from python 3. Also minor version updates generally don't break whole codebases.

Apropos Java backwards compatibility, Microsoft has been pretty good at ensuring strong backwards compatibility with .NET code. I've seen .NET 1.0 source compile and run just fine on .NET 4. Hell I've even witnessed .NET 1.0 binaries run just fine without recompilation in newer .NET environments.

Sure there's breaking differences between .NET Standard and .NET Core but they're two different products and that was made pretty apparent from the get-go.

It's not like we didn't have 10+ years of forewarning and many available ways to prepare 2.x codebases for a smooth transition. My 2.7 code passes through 2to3 with only the occasional manual fixup required because I heeded the warnings.

Java was designed upfront to be a language for large-team, long-lived, enterprise development. Whereas Python and PHP were originally toy languages that ended up filling a popular niche.

I mean, I agree with you. But Java benefits from well thought-out design constraints, ground-up IDE support, and an amazingly flexible bytecode interpreter. Normal people in the early 90s didn't have the resources to produce a language like Java.

> There's also functionality in PHP that shouldn't have been removed (register_globals) but should have been defaulted to disabled.

It was for years! They deprecated the feature. It was default disabled in php.ini. And now, as you said, if you really still need it you can code it yourself (I had to).

> And don't get me started about the annoyance that was removing mysql_* support.

I'm pretty sure that library isn't supported by MySQL server anymore (it's their library) so that's why it was removed. You can even use it to connect to newer versions of MySQL as the protocol changed.

I had this problem just yesterday. A dev decided to update their XAMPP to a version that uses PHP7.3. Took us a while to understand why he was getting notices that no one else was getting. The compact function started printing notices of undefined variables since that version, it's a small thing, but I can see breaking a lot of stuff that is not expecting it.

yeah the mysql_* function removal happened for no reason whatsoever. A library that did not need maintainance is something to keep , not throw away.

Even though it had no paramaterized/prepared queries and made injection issues abundant?

not a fault of the library itself. also, mysqli_* has the same issue, was not removed

It doesn't matter whose fault it is; if it provides no mechanism for prepared queries, it should be replaced.

mysqli_ has prepared queries, so it offers an immediate improvement.

Why couldn't the mysql_ library just have added prepared queries? I've never understood this (not a PHP programmer, just someone who has had to patch a dozen sites that were suddenly broken once).

MySQL libraries are extensions.

The mysqli library was likely a full rewrite in another extension. Extensions, at least that kind, at that time, didn't use/have namespaces.

Keep in mind this is a legacy code base with a function called mysql_real_escape string, like if you're at that point you're so far past gone you've lost all hope.

> like if you're at that point you're so far past gone you've lost all hope.

for a 25 year library, thats not at all too bad. And even PHP developers admit that the lib was "not broken"

You missed my point. All developers did was replace their mysql_* calls with mysqli_* calls but skipped out on the parameterising step. Sure they're using a parameterised capable API, but they're not actually parameterising their queries.

In the real world dropping the mysql_* API achieved next to bugger all, we still ended up with a bunch sites with exactly the same SQL injection vulns.

> All developers did was replace their mysql_*

They did? All of them? Nobody moved to paramaterized queries?

When you work for a mass market shared hoster you get to see all sorts of ugliness, dirty hacks, incompetence and just plain lazyness.

New code sure? But existing code? Especially large projects? No.

I am 100% a LOT of projects fall under this umbrella, but:

1) this is not an argument for leaving an inferior library in the language

2) plenty of people do update their software, for old code and large projects. Why not push people toward the better library?

mysqli_ has prepared queries, so it offers an immediate improvement.

Only if they're used. If mysqli_ required prepared statements, then it would be different. But the sins that were committed with mysql_* could still be committed with mysqli_*.

Absolutely, the idea was to provide prepared queries while allowing people to migrate their code.

The point wasn't "this fixed the injection problem" it was that it provided a solution not available for mysql_

> It doesn't matter whose fault it is

it does for old code. and many people prefer a website with bugs than a website that doesn't work at all. And any website that was vulnerable to mysql_* attacks should have already been hacked out of existence by now.

Unless something has changed since the early 2000s, `mysqli_` doesn't have a gazillion PHP/MySQL tutorials that are riddled with insecure code. That alone was a good reason to deprecate `mysql_`.

This mysql extension was deprecated six years ago. It lacked support for many important features such as transactions, stored procedures, parameterization that were either often insecurely shoehorned or simply not capable.

http://php.net/manual/en/mysqlinfo.api.choosing.php

Read my comment above where I explain why it was a pointless move:

>Those exact same insecure string concatenated queries are still being executed via mysqli_ and the PDO libraries. In my experience, binning mysql_ didn't make a damn bit of difference when it came to sql injection attacks.

I don't care how safe you think your input validation is, concatenating strings and variables together should NEVER be done for SQL. Writing your own input validation for SQL is similar to "homebrew crypto." Even if it's mostly safe, it'll eventually bite you in the ass. You won't think of every possible attack vector. Same goes for shell, XSS, etc... In CTFs, you'd be surprised at some of the shit that you end up doing to exploit these types of vulnerabilities.

Unlike ext/mysql, ext/mysqli and PDO both support server side prepared statements. If you don't utilize this properly, your argument is moot.

Official discussion points here: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/mysql_deprecation#why

The way I see it is new features, better practices, and greater security versus convenience. If the latter won, the former would need to be implemented on an ancient codebase, possibly opening up many new issues. If the former won and there's enough demand for ext/mysql, development may be continued by the community or at least shimmed on top of a proper extension or library. These decisions were being made while PHP was trying to gain traction in the "modern" web development community, making massive overall improvements leading to PHP 7+ due to pressure of Hack & HHVM, and doing a pretty damn good job with it.

Sure it sucked to convert existing code, but looking back, I'm glad I did, even if ext/mysql were still available. Luckily some of the larger, more abstracted codebases I've had to convert meant simply writing and swapping out an adapter. Most of the codebases I see nowadays still utilizing ext/mysql were clearly destined to bitrot regardless and now have far more important problems to worry about because they weren't designed to be maintained this long or they've been poorly maintained from inception. Good riddance.

You seem to have totally missed the point: mysql_* were removed in order to prevent string-concat SQL from being used, but people just end up doing the same thing with the new methods, so there was no benefit to removing them.

ext/mysql was not removed "to prevent string-concat SQL from being used." ext/mysqli and PDO allow raw SQL to be executed as well. It's just a necessary feature in some cases, but it should be reserved for static SQL.

Forming SQL by concatenating strings and variables is just bad practice and hopefully we can agree on that. ext/mysql provided no other option and this was just one of many issues with the extension.

Using ext/mysqli and PDO in a such a way (and I don't care if you're talking about retrofitting old code) is not even bad practice, it's just improper usage of the API when prepared statements should be used instead.

EDIT: Individually `print` `echo` `shell_exec` may be just as dangerous... It's up to the developer if they want to use them correctly.

> Individually `print` `echo` `shell_exec` may be just as dangerous... It's up to the developer if they want to use them correctly.

and you don't have to install ext/mysql, they could just remove it from default configuration

I think the point is that those functions could have just been aliased to other methods from other libraries, in order to maintain compatibility for older applications while removing the deprecated underlying library.