Hi Dale, "Dale Hirt via internals" in php.internals (Thu, 9 Jul 2020 18:48:44 +0000): >My name is Dale Hirt and I am the project manager for PHP inside >Microsoft. > >We currently support PHP with development and build efforts for PHP 7.3, >and PHP 7.4. In addition, we help with building PHP 7.2 on Windows >when security fixes are required.. > >However, as PHP 8.0 is now ramping up, we wanted to let the community >know what our current plans are going forward. > >We know that the current cadence is 2 years from release for bug fixes, >and 1 year after that for security fixes. This means that PHP 7.2 will >be going out of support in November. PHP 7.3 will be going into >security fix mode only in November. PHP 7.4 will continue to have >another year of bug fix and then one year of security fixes. We are >committed to maintaining development and building of PHP on Windows for >7.2, 7.3 and 7.4 as long as they are officially supported. > >We are not, however, going to be supporting PHP for Windows in any >capacity for version 8.0 and beyond.
This decision took me by surprise, to say the least. Microsoft's involvement in developing (thanks, Anatol) and building PHP for Windows was a huge boost for the PHP on Windows community. I am building PHP for Windows myself, but I know from the questions I am getting that a lot of corporate customers of Microsoft are running PHP on Windows Server 2016 or 2019. They are only allowed to use the official binaries that are supplied on windows.php.net or pecl.php.net. These corporate customers surely will not be amused by dropping Microsoft's support for PHP 8. Besides that, SMB customers are often using Microsoft Azure for their Windows Server needs. Windows Azure will loose a lot of selling points without supported PHP binaries. A quick search on Azure marketplace revealed as well that some Azure partners will also be left in the cold: https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps?search=windows+php Are the Azure Sales people already informed about your decision? Please rethink if your decision is really in line with Micrsoft's long term policy. -- Jan -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: https://www.php.net/unsub.php
