(04-13-2015, 03:25 PM)albert.freeman Wrote: It should be work with the version of PHP that is generally available on shared hosting services AND is still minimally supported by the PHP devs at the time of CI release.
Given that the minimum version of PHP for the CI3 release has not been supported for some time, maybe this should be revised to "...is still minimally supported by the PHP devs when development of CI4 begins." That would put it at some reasonable version of PHP 5.4, which appears to be acceptable to a large percentage of poll respondents (though not the current majority).
The rest of this is not necessarily directed at the person quoted above, but just a general statement of how I feel about the "minimum supported version" of PHP.
I could go with 5.5 or 5.6, because the impact on me would be minimal, but I'm fully aware that most people don't have the option of running their own servers, and the types of long-term-support OS releases that server admins like to run don't necessarily upgrade things like PHP on the schedules that developers would prefer.
I know that, even with some amount of control over my own server, I still had to push to get the PHP version moved up from 5.3, because the server's administrator felt that this meant the OS needed to be upgraded to a newer version (3 years before the EOL for the OS version in question). This also means that, unless I push again, the server is likely to stay on its current PHP version (with normal patches) for 4 more years.
The important thing is that, as much as possible, the framework support a minimum version which is widely available while allowing the developer to use as many newer versions as possible (as far as I know, CI3 supports every version of PHP available above its minimum requirement).
