TL;DR - Good news everyone! You have an extra week before feature freeze,
and GA is coming earlier than expected!
As alpha1 approaches, I was reviewing the scheduled release dates for 8.0
and noticed that we were offset from the active branch releases by 1 week.
In the interest of keeping releases aligned, and in consultation with my
co-release manager Gabriel as well as other RMs, I've decided to postpone
alpha1 by a week, meaning that alpha2 will coincide with the release of
7.4.8 and 7.3.20. We'll also be removing RC6 (we have a LOT of
pre-releases after all) such that 8.0.0 GA will align with the release of
7.4.13 and 7.3.25.
The upshot, as stated in the TL;DR above is that folks trying to get
last-minute features into the language/runtime have an extra week before
feature freeze (previously Jul 28th, now Aug 4th), and users should expect
8.0.0-final a week earlier (previously Dec 3rd, now Nov 26th).
Obviously, this schedule is still subject to change if we find problems
during the pre-release which warrant additional time.
You may find the revised schedule at https://wiki.php.net/todo/php80
-Sara Golemon