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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T06:49:35+00:00

I’m maintaining library written for PHP 5.2 and I’d like to create PHP 5.3-namespaced

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I’m maintaining library written for PHP 5.2 and I’d like to create PHP 5.3-namespaced version of it. However, I’d also keep non-namespaced version up to date until PHP 5.3 becomes so old, that even Debian stable ships it 😉

I’ve got rather clean code, about 80 classes following Project_Directory_Filename naming scheme (I’d change them to \Project\Directory\Filename of course) and only few functions and constants (also prefixed with project name).

Question is: what’s the best way to develop namespaced and non-namespaced versions in parallel?

  • Should I just create fork in repository and keep merging changes between branches? Are there cases where backslash-sprinkled code becomes hard to merge?

  • Should I write script that converts 5.2 version to 5.3 or vice-versa? Should I use PHP tokenizer? sed? C preprocessor?

  • Is there a better way to use namespaces where available and keep backwards compatibility with older PHP?

Update: Decided against use of namespaces after all.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I don’t think preprocessing the 5.3 code this is a great idea. If your code is functionally identical in both PHP 5.2 and 5.3 with the exception of using namespaces, instead of underscore-separated prefixes, why use namespaces at all? In that case it sounds to me like you want to use namespaces, for the sake of using namespaces..

    I do think you’ll find that as you migrate to namespaces, you will start to ‘think a bit differently’ about organizing your code.

    For this reason, I strongly agree with your first solution. Create a fork and do backports of features and bugfixes.

    Good luck!

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