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Organization: PHP Development Team
Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2012 13:51:19 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP 5.3 - end of live schedule
From: johannes@php.net (Johannes =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Schl=FCter?=)

Hi,

On Mon, 2012-12-10 at 20:21 +0800, Adam Harvey wrote:
> At the very least, I think we should keep full support going until
> 5.5.0 final is out, which it strikes me probably won't be in February
> at our current rate.
> 
> Beyond that, I don't particularly want to create a rod for our own
> backs ($DEITY knows, _I'm_ useless at merging across branches, as you
> all know), but I wonder if 5.3 might need a bit longer in one form or
> another. RHEL 6, Debian 6, Ubuntu 12.04 (not the latest stable
> version, unlike the others, but the LTS version), Mac OS X 10.8 (and
> many of the derivatives of these distros, particularly RHEL) are all
> shipping PHP 5.3 packages by default. As a result, I think the odds
> are that developers are likely to develop and deploy applications on
> PHP 5.3 for quite some time to come. (Plus, 5.3 had most of the big
> headline features of the last few years — a lot of people will
> consider it "good enough".)
> 
> I'm not suggesting we necessarily extend full support, but I wonder if
> one year of critical bug fixes and security updates will be enough.

In my opinion key for this is PR. Get people to migrate to 5.4. We are
still flexible to interpret what "critical" issues are, and to merge and
release those. (And extend that time if we see too little migration)

For distributions at least Ondřej supported this option from Debian
perspective. In my opinion distributions in fact would be happy with
this. all they want are "critical" fixes in their "stable" and backport
only this. The more we prefilter the simpler for them.

Please also mind: Most bugs exist for years, most are older than 5.3. If
they lived with those on 5.2 they are no stoppers to migrate away from
there. The biggest category of 5.3-only bugs is around gc. PHP 5.3 won't
stop working and for operations there is no big difference after
February 2013 ... rather less risk of getting bug fixes which, by
accident, change behavior. Therefore after February 2013 users updating
need less validation when updating.

johannes