Let's make a 5.7 release

Good evening, I’ve kept putting this off, but given the current “move phpng to master” vote, I really can’t delay this any longer. It looks like PHP 7 is going to happen and phpng will be the base of that. While we could move straight to PHP 7 after the release of PHP 5.6, I think there is some merit in having one more 5.x release, namely 5.7, which would follow our usual release process and come out next year. PHP 7, as a major release, is likely to take much longer than a usual minor release. While some people might think one year is realistic, I highly doubt that, as I suspect phpng will not be the only new feature PHP 7 will contain. Major releases come with major changes, and I suspect some others will crop up, and these might delay the release. Because it will probably take two to three years, having a minor release in the meantime means userland developers won’t be starved of new features which don’t need to be in a major release and could be in a minor. Another point is that PHP 7 is probably going to break backwards-compatibility more significantly than minors would. For starters, phpng will break extension compatibility, and new proposals are likely to break userland compatibility as well. By making 5.7 happen, developers will have more time to switch to PHP 7 and can keep their existing codebases for longer. As PHP 7 may break backwards-compatibility, 5.7 gives us a chance to add deprecation warnings and such to help people prepare for 7. Finally, it is a fallback. If we do end up targeting 7 to come out next year, then if serious issues cause delays to 7, we will have a less ambitious and working new release to fall back on. I should clarify that I don’t wish to delay phpng at all, I am very much in favour of it and excited about it, nor do I expect this to delay it. We can simply work on two releases at once: PHP 7, an ambitious BC-breaking release to come out later, and PHP 5.7, a safe, non-breaking release that will come out next year with the usual schedule. Thoughts? Thanks! -- Andrea Faulds http://ajf.me/