Monday, 16 April 2007

Compatibility for New PHP Versions with PHP on Cruise

The assurance of compatibility with new PHP versions is a difficult task. A plethora of problems crops up while assuring compatibility. These problems can be addition of features and changes in minor versions, bugs you didn't even know they exist and having been open for years ‘suddenly’ get fixed. On the other hand there are no bug fix-only or security fix-only releases, so you are more or less forced to regularly update your PHP. However Sebastian Nohn says assuring compatibility is easy with a little help of Cruise Control as long as you have automated tests for your software with PHP on Cruise.

Sebastian says, PHP on Cruise fetches the latest version of the Concurrent Versions System (CVS) (stable) tree, compiles it with your standard configure options and runs your tests. If these tests pass, you should be fine with the next version. If these tests fail, either PHP has been broken, or your application uses deprecated stuff or uses bugs as features. If the latter is the case, you have enough time to fix your application, he assures. If not, he advises you to report the issue at bugs.php.net to make PHP better.