In this new post to his blog till argues his case for PEAR and why support for PHP4 is a good thing when it comes to making things "just work."

Every once in someone likes to argue that PEAR is all fugly PHP4 code and why you should not use it, and instead go and use another framework or component library. Most of those people also say that they looked at or used PEAR x years ago and then act all surprised when someone else disagrees.

He talks about some of the rules around the major/minor PEAR releases and backwards compatibility breaks which, thankfully, a lot of other projects seem to adhere to. He points out that some packages have been started for different PHP generations (Mail_Queue2 vs Mail_Queue) and a few reasons why the PHP4 EON doesn't automatically mean PEAR should follow suit.

On cyberlot's blog today, he mentions some additional backwards compatibility bugs that PHP 5.1 and 4.4.1 are adding into the mix.

As of PHP 5.1 and in seems 4.4.1 are adding another BC break one that could break anyone using a object based database library within there custom session handler, and also make any registered shutdown function useless if it relys on objects, although the bugs focus on the session aspect of things.

This isn't something you can just "Document" away like they are trying to do.

Basically they are saying any user made or PHP made object is useless during the shutdown phase of PHP.

I could definitely see this issue causing some headaches for a lot of people out there. For more information on this issue, check out the bug report he refers to...