I am sad.... PHP v5.4 on CentOS 7

General questions
1

I am sad to see that piwik won’t update to the latest version because my servers run the latest version of PHP 5.4 as supported by the latest version of CentOS 7 :disappointed:

With CentOS 7 having an EOL 2024 (2020 for full updates), that means I’m doomed to an outdated piwik for many years, a piwik that won’t offer the latest features possible.

I wish the developers would reconsider their decision to not support older PHP versions, especially when many of us can’t move to PHP 7 for various reasons. In addition, my experience shows that it is easy to support PHP 5.4 since most applications rarely use PHP 7-specific code, or they can easily offer a compatibility layer.

I’d appreciate your thoughts.

Thank you.

2

My thoughts that Piwik have rightly followed PHP’s own technical guidelines:

PHP Supported Versions (PHP.net)

The above link does provide a pretty good timeline of events. LTS Support for 5.4 ended at the turn of the year. Piwik would otherwise be supporting insecurely a no-longer-maintained library.

3

Your statement above is completely ignorant.

Major Linux distributors, like RHEL (and in turn CentOS), extend support for PHP on their own products. The CentOS 7 EOL for 2024 (2020 for full updates) includes PHP 5.4 and offers full support and backports for all major/important patches that are applied to later versions of PHP.

Little kids may want the latest and greatest of features, but in a corporate environment this is not always the case, thus a supported and stable PHP that does not change, is very important, especially for older applications that may need considerable changes (and testing) to support a major version change.

4

We will never support php 5.4 again. it’s slow, buggy, and got many security issues. Seriously upgrade to PHP 5.5 or PHP7

5

If you know of any security issues, you may report them to the relevant bugzilla and they will be fixed, php 5.4 is fully supported on systems with LTS (long term support).

Many systems will stay with their default PHP (CentOS, Ubuntu LTS server, etc) for stability and in some cases due to strict company/corporate rules and regulations. It is important to understand this, because it affects PHP in general, for example the same issue will happen with other versions in the near future, when you decide that v5.5 is too slow buggy or whatever. This will leave thousands of supported systems unable to run the latest piwik v3, like CentOS 7.

I believe you should reconsider allowing piwik v3 to at least work with PHP v5.4/5.5/5.6 for as long as LTS support is around (2020 or 2024).

Thank you.

6

Sorry to be crude, but that’s ridiculous. That’s not how software or operations work, in the modern world. And we don’t care about reporting issues to old, buggy, insecure PHP versions. Time is precious these days :slight_smile:

7

If you were afraid of compatibility issues, you would run php-fpm in another port and have apache/nginx/inserthere point to it for /piwik/.

But I guess that’s what us little kids do, not big corporate ‘professionals’.