Re: PHP 5.6 life cycle

Hi Stas, 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?

As others have pointed out, there's also the problem of PHP 5 lifetime extension reducing the urgency for users to move to 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.

Support for 5.6 ends in August 2017, that's 20 months away. So it's not quite as bad as that. Thanks. -- Andrea Faulds http://ajf.me/