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Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2012 21:08:34 +0800
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP 5.3 - end of live schedule
From: aharvey@php.net (Adam Harvey)

On 10 December 2012 20:51, Johannes Schl=C3=BCter <johannes@php.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, 2012-12-10 at 20:21 +0800, Adam Harvey wrote:
>> 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)

I couldn't agree more.

> For distributions at least Ond=C5=99ej 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.

To be honest, Debian isn't really the distribution I'm worried about.
Ond=C5=99ej does good work, and Debian Wheezy has PHP 5.4 and isn't miles
off, it seems.

RHEL and Ubuntu are mostly the ones I'm thinking of here =E2=80=94 RHEL 7 i=
s
supposed to be out in the second half of next year, but history (and
my own experience both in supporting users and dealing with vendors)
suggests that RHEL users are slow to upgrade. Ubuntu won't have
another LTS release until 2014.

> 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.

All true as well. And as I said, I'm not really gunning for full
support to be extended (beyond 5.5.0 final, anyway).

I think the idea of being flexible on this is fine so long as there's
an eventual hard and fast date announced some time next year. Let's
see how the distro situation shakes out, and how the charm offensive
in the first half of next year goes in terms of getting users to
upgrade to 5.4 and 5.5. :) I just wanted to flag it, mostly.

Adam