PHP 4 Good Riddance

Tomorrow some time during the afternoon all our servers will have PHP 4 removed from them due to the end of life being today (August 8th 2008).  Although there was new release on Thursday the 7th to address some security holes it’s quite clear it’s time to stop using considering in the PHP news post it also says it’ll be the last release.  For anyone who’s curious here’s what was part of the PHP 4.4.9 release:

• Updated PCRE to version 7.7.
• Fixed overflow in memnstr().
• Fixed crash in imageloadfont when an invalid font is given.
• Fixed open_basedir handling issue in the curl extension.
• Fixed mbstring.func_overload set in .htaccess becomes global.

The one thing that has been holding us back from doing this migration is we have customers specifically setting their PHP scripts to PHP4!  This after we sent an email almost a year ago about PHP4 now being unsupported and could be removed at any time.  We’ve also had several more announcements about the pending removal of PHP4 including one last week.  So I’m expecting numerous tickets complaining about this change, but unfortunately you need to get rid of legacy things like this eventually especially when the pose security risks.

So here’s hoping no one complains but I imagine we’ll have at least a few tickets related to the switch.  Hopefully it’ll be a matter of the users just updating to a newer version of their script but who knows.  People just do not upgrade things until their sites break even after being warned countless times over the course of a year. So good riddance PHP4!  You should have been removed from our servers 3 years ago!