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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP 5.6 life cycle
From: larry@garfieldtech.com (Larry Garfield)

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