"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.
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.