A debate that is going on among many CMS projects. Ryan Boren asks if it's time for Wordpress to drop support for MySQL 3.23?
WordPress currently requires MySQL 3.23.23 or greater. We’ve long avoid bumping our requirements so that we could accommodate the widest variety of hosting environments. We understand that people don’t want to upgrade a platform that is working just fine for them. However, supporting these older versions adds development and support costs. Recently, a commit went into trunk that bumped the MySQL requirement from 3.23.23 to 4.0 or greater. Considering that MySQL AB is dropping support for 3.23 and no longer provides binary downloads for 3.23, is it time for WordPress to move on? How many of you are still running 3.23?
You also may want to note that he proposes putting minimum support for MySQL starting with version 4.0. Shouldn't we just get through the pain of an upgrade in one try...how about minimum support for MySQL 4.1? I also know some MySQL fanatics that argue most database users should be at MySQL 5.x.