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Comment by mparlane | Hacker News Reader

I work on systems where D) is perfectly reasonable. Where one "small" change results in a hell of a lot of regression testing and doc changes.

What I don't get is that they are keen to modify php source. But not to just keep using the same php release?

I agree with E, they take floats not strings apparently.

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Maybe there are other guidelines (Security related, no maintenance for the old release) that were 'forcing' them to update.

I guarantee that security guidelines were not involved in any decision about which version of PHP to use in a project. All PHP code is security tainted and needs protection at the underlying data service layer.

I would almost guarantee security guidelines were the reason. He states they are dealing with tax data, and I would bet they handle some credit card data as well. If they even touch credit card data they have to be PCI compliant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Card_Industry_Data_Secu...) which requires specific versions of PHP.

If it requires specific versions of PHP, I would hope that doesn't include a self-patched build that deliberately masks erroneous input data by treating NULL as 0

The moment you run a patched build, you're IMHO not running the officially sanctioned version any more.

Reporter posted this: "...which is why we are moving to a supported, fairly-recent platform". I'm guessing it's the support their after.

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