Hi!
The PHP.net website has in the last 20 years made use of an extensive
network of mirrors_ to make the PHP documentation available, and
distribute source tarballs_. These mirrors have been maintained by
members and companies in the PHP eco-system for many valuable years.
However, the administration of the mirror system is often haphazard,
with few contributors helping out—PHP is Open Source, and this is simply
how these things can go.
Maintaining the mirrors is now no longer sustainable, and also hinders
the take up of moving the PHP.net website fully to HTTPS. Because the
PHP.net team has no access to the mirror servers, we also can't make
sure the mirrors are up-to-date, and some mirrors are still running PHP
5.3 (actually, about 25% still run PHP 5.3!).
It is likely no longer necessary to have a mirror system in place, as
unlike 20 years ago, it is not nearly has hard as setting up a
distributed cache system. As a matter of fact, some of the PHP.net web
site, through http://www.php.net/, already sits behind a Content
Delivery Network (CDN) from Myra_, which is sponsored by long time PHP
contributor Sascha Schumann.
With these preliminaries out of the way, I would therefore like to
announce the discontinuation of PHP.net's mirroring program. Instead of
having mirrors, we are moving all of PHP.net to HTTPS (and get rid of
https://secure.php.net), and move them behind Myra's CDN, with the same
local content delivery opportunities, but at significantly less
administration requirements.
In the next week or so, I will e-mail out a plan on which steps are
necessary for this move. I'd be happy to hear any comments on when the
plan comes out.
To end this email, I would very much like to thank all the mirror
maintainers for their dedication, time, and bandwidth over all these
years. Thanks!
cheers,
Derick
.. _mirrors: http://php.net/mirrors.php
.. _tarballs: http://uk3.php.net/downloads.php
.. _Myra: https://myracloud.com/en/
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