I wish I understood why # is no longer allowed as a commentline character in php.ini for 5.4

Isn't it nearly universally accepted in every other language?

Let me know if you spot the developer discussion on this logic?

(update: apparently this started with 5.3 not 5.4)

This change was made to fall in line with other .ini parsers, it is after all an "official" configuration file format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INI_file

Using # was an extension on top of what is allowed in Windows...

Per that page:

"Some software supports the use of the number sign (#) as an alternative to the semicolon for indicating comments."

What's the 'official' definition of the ini format and what's really not allowed?

The ini file format was first introduced in Microsoft Windows. The API's that are available in WIN/WIN32 are probably considered the most official and it does not support # as a comment delimiter...

Pleasing to see regular iteration on PHP 5.x after the weirdness around PHP 6.

Help me understand what's happening here.

According to the referenced ChangeLog

    Version 5.4.6    16-August-2012
    Version 5.3.16   16-August-2012
    Version 5.4.5    19-July-2012
    Version 5.3.15   19-July-2012

There is a 5.3.X and a 5.4.X version happening concurrently?

> There is a 5.3.X and a 5.4.X version happening concurrently?

That's not uncommon, and useful for people in production who'd still need bug fixes but don't want to risk breakages due to new features (and potential grammar changes) and the like. Language versions often have end-of-life dates which follows the release of the next version (and even the one after that) by a significant amount of time (Python 2.6 will be EOL'd in October 2013, even though Python 2.7.0 was released in July 2010.

FWIW (and ignoring the 3.x timeline) here's the CPython relase history for 2.6 and 2.7:

    2008-10-01 22:05 +0000 v2.6
    2008-12-04 02:59 +0000 v2.6.1
    2009-04-14 13:16 +0000 v2.6.2
    2009-10-01 23:39 +0000 v2.6.3
    2009-10-26 01:48 +0000 v2.6.4
    2010-03-18 22:14 +0000 v2.6.5
    2010-07-03 13:57 +0000 v2.7
    2010-08-23 23:37 +0000 v2.6.6
    2010-11-27 14:40 +0000 v2.7.1
    2011-06-11 09:50 -0500 v2.7.2
    2012-04-09 19:04 -0400 v2.7.3
    2012-04-10 10:59 -0400 v2.6.8

(yeah I know it's missing the 2.6.7 tag, not sure why it's not in the repo, it should be right before 2.7.2, on 2011-06-03; also the last 2.5 release — 2.5.6 — happened between 2.7.1 and 2.7.2, 2011-05-28)

That's fairly common. 5.3 hasn't reached end-of-life yet, so bugs are still being fixed. 5.3.16 is a bugfix release, wheres 5.4 will contain bugfixes and may (I don't know, I haven't read the release logs) also contain new features.

Perhaps 5.4 made some breaking changes so they'll keep updating 5.3 with security fixes and such for a while until it's fair to ask people to upgrade.

Yes, 5.4 introduced breaking changes such as the new array syntax (finally!), among other things. There was also a very heavy amount of refactoring internally in the Zend Engine, which could cause extensions to break.

The new array syntax isn't a breaking change; however there was a lot of functionality deprecated in 5.3 that was completely removed in 5.4 which would definitely break some code.

Unfortunately there were some bugs introduced in 5.4 that are preventing us from upgrading (our actual code is fine). Quite a shame as I'm quite looking forward to the new additions.

I probably should have worded that better, but what I meant was that the new syntax will cause errors on 5.3.

This makes me sad. I have been self-taught PHP developer for 10+ years but after I "discovered" Ruby on Rails there is no going back.

For those of you who still thinks PHP is the best thing - don't give me bad karma :)

Why exactly does an update to a language make you sad?

Especially one seeing many improvements.