Re: PHP 8 next?

On 06/23/2018 03:11 PM, Zeev Suraski wrote:

-----Original Message----- From: php@golemon.com [mailto:php@golemon.com] On Behalf Of Sara Golemon Sent: Sunday, June 24, 2018 1:07 AM To: Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com> Cc: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net> Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP 8 next? On Sat, Jun 23, 2018 at 4:22 PM, Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com> wrote:

Based on some recent conversations, I'm getting the impression that after PHP 7.3, we might want to go for PHP 8 next. I'd like to discuss and possibility decide this now, as that would make PHP 7.3 the last chance to get in deprecations.

Would you mind elaborating on your motivations for a major version bump. I'm not saying I disagree in principle, I'm just curious what you're seeing the drivers as.

This is slightly earlier than I intended to bring it up but I do too think that the next version beyond 7.3 should be 8.

I disagree. I'm mostly a user, not a PHP developer. RHEL 7.5, the latest version of RHEL, still ships 5.4. Other LTS distributions also probably ship 5.x. So a major version bump now would mean three major versions of PHP that web applications intended to "just work" on enterprise *nix would have to support. If there was a major design flaw in PHP that can only truly be fixed by an incompatible version bump past 7 then do it but otherwise, I think it would be better to wait until the most recent versions of enterprise distributions have moved to php 7. I'm hoping RHEL 8 does, the benefits are tremendous of 7 over 6.x, but... The issue is some customers of enterprise linux specifically don't want frankenstein systems and want to use vendor supported packages only, and I can see their point of view because they pay a lot of money for that support. That being said, I try to get everyone running old PHP up to 7.1 or 7.2 even if it means frankenstein systems. But some think the benefit of enterprise vendor support outweighs the improvements in PHP.