On 14 August 2014 22:41, Andrea Faulds <a...@ajf.me> wrote: > > On 14 Aug 2014, at 22:34, Jan Ehrhardt <php...@ehrhardt.nl> wrote: > >> PHP 5.3 has reached the real end of life. Will the effect be that from >> now on PHP 5.4 will only get security fixes? > > I’m curious about this too. The release process RFC says only bug fixes after > 2 years, and it is well beyond that now (5.4 came out March 2012). > > Look at the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#Release_history > > That 5.4 bit should be yellow. 5.6 ought to be green, too, but alas this > release, like every, has been delayed.
For me this is a better way to explain why 5.4 is not (currently) security only. We maintain the current and the previous, we should not arbitrarily change the status of the previous before there is a new current. The release of 5.6 should push 5.4 into security-only state, rather than the 5.3 EOL. I realise in this case it should happen at almost the same time (I think the plan is that 5.6.0RC3 is the last RC?) but let's imagine that 5.7 is delayed by 5 years for some reason - it's reasonable to expect that 5.4 would be dropped a long time before 5.7 is released in this scenario, since "security only" mode is (as I see it) only to give stragglers the chance to upgrade, we don't want to maintain 3 branches for the sake of it. The release process helps to ensure that upgrading should now be considerably less painful that it previously was, and saying goodbye to 5.3 means that all currently maintained branches have been (largely) subject to this process. This makes "security only" for the sake of stragglers less relevant, meaning that we shouldn't need to keep 5.4 alive for nearly as long as 5.3 has been. Because of this, when 5.4 *is* EOL, that doesn't necessarily mean that 5.5 is suddenly security only. IMO, YMMV Thanks, Chris -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
