My standpoint would be not to add E_DEPRECATED notices in 5.5... It's simply used too much to start loudly complaining about it. Instead, what I would suggest is the following:
1. Officially deprecate it now. Right now, on the docs it says "discouraged", but I would suggest changing that to officially deprecated. 2. The next release (5.6 or 6) would add deprecation errors to the code. 3. The next release (5.7 or 6 or 6.1, etc) would then remove the extension entirely. That way there's a significant roadmap towards deprecation, and people can migrate their code in tune. Sure, there are people who won't do anything and will break on that major release, but there's not much we can do about that anyway... Just my $0.02...
