Re: PHP 5.6 life cycle

On 12/06/2015 03:43 PM, Stanislav Malyshev wrote:

Hi!

IMHO, I think we need to look at the 5.6 lifecycle very differently from how we look at 5.5 and earlier. This is really the 5.x lifecycle as it's the last version that's relatively completely painless to upgrade to from 5.x (especially 5.3 and later).

We could make 5.6 an LTS release with extended support, but the question is given the code delta, would all fixes' authors be willing to do essentially double work? Would extension authors be willing to maintain two branches long-term? And, if that proves to be hard - wouldn't we end up with a situation where they choose to only maintain PHP 5 version (since it's easier and that's where 90% of people are) and extensions go unsupported for PHP 7 for a long time, creating an adoption problem for 7? I do think we probably need to extend the lifetime of 5.6 (and make an RFC on it) since I see no way to have everybody to adopt PHP 7 in mere 8 months, but we should have a defined EOL date ASAP.

Drupal has maintained a current-stable and last-stable version for most of its history, with those two versions not being API-compatible. After the first few months, if anything it's the last-stable that gets effectively unmaintained by extension developers who want to work with the new shiny. To be sure, Drupal and PHP are a different dynamic and target audience but at least in my experience "only maintain PHP 5 extension, not PHP 7" seems like a very unlikely problem, especially once a PHP 7-version of a library exists. --Larry Garfield