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Date: Mon, 7 Dec 2015 13:58:22 +0000
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP 5.6 life cycle
From: ajf@ajf.me (Andrea Faulds)

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/