Going PHP 5.3

For a great number of years, MidCOM's minimum required PHP version has been 5.1, which increasingly became a burden: Since we couldn't use things like the DateTime class, we had to depend on some ill-maintained PEAR packages, we needed custom JSON encoding functions and so on and so forth. So one the first things that happened after the creation of the OpenPSA repository was to bump the PHP requirement to 5.2, which has helped in quite a few places to reduce the cruft that has accumulated over time.

Now we're approaching a point where 5.2 is becoming a burden as well: There's quite a lot of code that could be replaced with builtin 5.3 functionality, and seeing how 5.2 was EOL'ed more than a year ago and the 5.4 is just around the corner, there seems little point in continuing to maintain backwards compatibility for a shrinking audience. Especially since this also prevents us from working with more modern PHP environments like Symfony2.

So unless there is any major outrage the upcoming beta3 release will be the last one supporting PHP 5.2. If you have any objections, speak up now or forever hold your peace :-)