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
