Re: PHP 5.6 life cycle

On Mon, Dec 07, 2015 at 12:17:55PM +0200, Arvids Godjuks wrote: > Hello internals, > > In my opinion, right now what dictates the timeframes is Release Process > RFC: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/releaseprocess > It clearly states the rules of how things are done. > If dates for the PHP 5.6 are to be adjusted, than it requires an RFC > process and should be an exception, not the rule. > > But, for what it's worth - it's fine as it is. Distros will support 5.6 as > long as they need, you can always download older versions for Windows from > php.net archive and so on. It still has almost 2 years in security fixes > left, and that's more than enough time for people to make a move. Others > will just not care to do that anyway for whatever reasons, and nothing can > be done about it. We need to be aware that there are 3 types of user: 1) those who run PHP on a machine provided by their ISP 2) those who run their machine using software that comes ''with the operating system'', I am thinking of Linux users, mainly: RedHat, Debian, SUSE 3) those who are happy & able to upgrade their machine to the something reasonably recent. Those who I want to talk about are (2), they want to have their systems kept up to date by running a daily cron job (yum update, or apt-get ...). We cannot rely on these systems being rebuilt, some have very long lifetimes, eg RedHat/CentOS 7 will be supported until 2024 - and by default runs PHP 5.4 We need to persuade the distros to have PHP 7 available *in addition* to whatever PHP 5.x they have. However: they will probably continue to support PHP 5.x until that version of their OS is EOLed -- which is work that they will have to do. PHP 5.x will still be in use for many years: people put a machine together to do something and then don't want to fiddle with it (which might break applications) for as long as possible. But also they, naturally, want bug fixes. -- Alain Williams Linux/GNU Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer. +44 (0) 787 668 0256 http://www.phcomp.co.uk/ Parliament Hill Computers Ltd. Registration Information: http://www.phcomp.co.uk/contact.php #include <std_disclaimer.h>