[Gllug] Cost of RedHat vs Ubuntu desktop support

[Richard Jones]

On Tue, Jul 07, 2009 at 09:43:33PM +0100, Sean Burlington wrote:
> and someone else has asked the (now obvious) question
> 
> http://drupal.org/node/502452
> "Is it possible to check for the specific features required for drush 
> (e.g., JSON), rather than checking the PHP version number?"
> 
> Well I'm glad I asked about RH and PHP - I've learned something useful :-)
> 
> ... but how do I know which features the RH version of PHP has?

The standard advice is to check for the features you need, not the
version number.  For example, according to the above bug report and
the PHP 5.2.0 release announcement, a JSON module was added to PHP.
So if the software needed that, it should check for the presence of
the JSON module, and not 'is php_version >= 5.2'.

> Normally when I'm not sure I check the PHP manual - which tells me which 
> version number a feature was available from.

Yes, so this is a problem with backporting.  The version just tells
you the minimum set of features.

Of course when new RHEL (eg. 6) releases come out, we rebase
everything, and version numbers are "back to normal" as it were.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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