On 12/06/2015 03:43 PM, Stanislav Malyshev wrote:
Hi!
IMHO, I think we need to look at the 5.6 lifecycle very differently from
how we look at 5.5 and earlier. This is really the 5.x lifecycle as it's
the last version that's relatively completely painless to upgrade to from
5.x (especially 5.3 and later).
We could make 5.6 an LTS release with extended support, but the question
is given the code delta, would all fixes' authors be willing to do
essentially double work? Would extension authors be willing to maintain
two branches long-term? And, if that proves to be hard - wouldn't we end
up with a situation where they choose to only maintain PHP 5 version
(since it's easier and that's where 90% of people are) and extensions go
unsupported for PHP 7 for a long time, creating an adoption problem for 7?
I do think we probably need to extend the lifetime of 5.6 (and make an
RFC on it) since I see no way to have everybody to adopt PHP 7 in mere 8
months, but we should have a defined EOL date ASAP.
Drupal has maintained a current-stable and last-stable version for most
of its history, with those two versions not being API-compatible. After
the first few months, if anything it's the last-stable that gets
effectively unmaintained by extension developers who want to work with
the new shiny.
To be sure, Drupal and PHP are a different dynamic and target audience
but at least in my experience "only maintain PHP 5 extension, not PHP 7"
seems like a very unlikely problem, especially once a PHP 7-version of a
library exists.
--Larry Garfield
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