Speaking as an ex-hoster here who had to look after a fleet of shared servers running PHP (000's of sites) for 15 years, sadly life is not that simple in the trenches. The major problem with PHP is breaking changes. Even within the 5.x releases there were enough breaking changes such that upgrading from say 5.3 to 5.6 could break a site. The jump from 5.6 to 7.x has enough breaking changes to make you cry. I think there should have been a commitment to maintain 5.6 for the next ten years, if only for security fixes.
Now I'm not suggesting that developers shouldn't go back and fix stuff that breaks because the PHP folks removed/altered that functionality (with the good intentions of encouraging more secure programming, for example), but there's a labour cost and someone needs to pay for that time.
There's also functionality in PHP that shouldn't have been removed (register_globals) but should have been defaulted to disabled. Sure register_globals is insecure but what we saw were folks adding the same functionality back, just google for "php emulate register_globals".
And don't get me started about the annoyance that was removing mysql_* support. 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.
Don't get me wrong, I admire the efforts of the PHP core team, but they made a rod for our already sore support backs whenever a new release of PHP shipped because of some fairly unnecessary BC's.
"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)_/¯
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
and you don't have to install ext/mysql, they could just remove it from default configuration
mysqli_ has prepared queries, so it offers an immediate improvement.
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.
They did? All of them? Nobody moved to paramaterized queries?
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?
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.
for a 25 year library, thats not at all too bad. And even PHP developers admit that the lib was "not broken"
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_*.
The point wasn't "this fixed the injection problem" it was that it provided a solution not available for mysql_
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.
Of those PHP websites, most of them are probably wordpress. How many of those haven't been updated in ages?
That's way more dangerous than running PHP 5, taking into account all distros will backport security fixes for years to come.
Do you expect all node small and medium completed projects run on latest node?
PHP has adopted a strategy of rolling version upgrades with defined end points. They probably should have some "LTS (Long Term Support) type releases.
http://php.net/supported-versions.php
5.6 just reached eol. I think they've put out a securtiy patch since then so its (not quite) completely abandoned.
If people aren't forced to upgrade their sites, they won't. So there is huge incentive to just keep running the older versions.
Debian 8 (Jessie) still has a little over a year left, for example, and is on PHP 5. Ubuntu 14 is just nearing the end of support, and is on PHP 5. Same with OpenSUSE and CentOS.
I'm not sure what the Red Hat situation is, because the pages at Redhat that Google found that would probably tell me are in the knowledge base, and will only show me the question, telling me I have to be a Red Hat subscriber to see the answer.
This is one of the annoyances with some major frameworks. According to both the Symfony and Laravel requirements pages, they need PHP 7.1.3. As far as I can tell that's not included in any LTS release of any major Linux distribution, which top out at 7.0.33 currently, I believe.
PS: interesting oddity somewhere in HN. When on the "reply" screen for your comment, HN says your comment is 1 day old. However, back in the thread, or on a direct link to your comment, it says that it is 6 hours old. It does the same thing for all 6 hour old comments in this thread, but not 5 hour old comments.
Oh you cant run lib/framework/tool due to host deps? No problem, I will just replace you with a script.
For example by default the Website runs in PHP 5.6 and it is up to the site owner to change the local site version to a newer version via cPanel or similar.
So non technical users that just know a bit of PHP or use some CMS, end up being stuck with the default version.
Edit: Fixed some language errors and typos.