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Comment by ecaron | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there are dark factors at play for dropping the XP support. Although the most thorough discussion of it is at http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/177732/why-wa..., the conspiracist in me says that Microsoft (pierre's employer) pressured him to drop support - even though it wasn't entirely necessary to do so.

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The answers in that thread seem to be reasonable. XP is a decade-old OS, we should be glad that it will finally pass on April 2014. Supporting multiple operating systems takes time, especially for one that old. At some point it's best to move on.

If your company is affected by lack of XP support in this PHP build, it should be a temporary convenience at worst. What are your plans to migrate off XP over the next year? As of next April there will be no patches or security fixes coming for XP. Is your company planning on paying Microsoft for continued support, or will it negotiate extended XP support in return for buying company-wide Windows 8 licenses and start the ride over again?

I suspect that many of the people using XP today are frozen and wouldn't upgrade their PHP anyway, for the same reasons they're using XP and IE6. They either don't want to change their software because of cost/risk issues or the people who wrote it moved on years ago and they have no idea how it works.

I think you're right about the reasons for not upgrading. For orgs still using IE6 and XP, statistically it's very likely they're not going to be doing new development in PHP 5.5. (statistics pulled from thin air based on 15 years of experience with PHP and orbs who use it).

There's not been any security patches for PHP 4 for many years, but people still use it. Those same sorts of orgs will continue to use stuff out of date and unsupported for any number of reasons. Catering development processes around an increasingly small number of users doesn't make sense.

That's a good catch, and the justification was a little soft. But would you blame them?

Frankly, I'm irritated at them for dragging their heals on getting the PECL4Win back up and running (and the lack of updates to http://downloads.php.net/pierre/ doesn't help matters.)

Since I've moved to the camp of "You developing PHP and use Windows? Let me show you how to setup Vagrant" I've become less concerned about the state of PHP & Windows. I just won't tolerate when people say PHP dropping XP support is a good thing (which the OP wasn't saying, but some have.)

DLLs for PECL exts are currently available here: http://windows.php.net/downloads/pecl/ Not for all of them, but some of the more important ones. If you want something added to the list it's usually as simple as pinging Pierre on IRC :)

Someone should update the "In the meantime, some extensions can be found here." link on http://windows.php.net/, then.

Regarding XP support; i'm not invested in this discussion, but the code has #defines for NETWARE[1], riscos[2], and even CRAY[3] in it... The last NetWare and RISC OS releases were (surprisingly to me) only 3 years ago, but surely XP is even now a much bigger deployment target? How often does the CRAY code get tested?

1. http://lxr.php.net/search?q=&defs=&refs=NETWARE&...

2. http://lxr.php.net/search?q=__riscos__&defs=&refs=&#...

3. http://lxr.php.net/search?q=CRAY&defs=&refs=&pat...

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