On Mon, Dec 07, 2015 at 12:17:55PM +0200, Arvids Godjuks wrote:
> Hello internals,
> 
> In my opinion, right now what dictates the timeframes is Release Process
> RFC: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/releaseprocess
> It clearly states the rules of how things are done.
> If dates for the PHP 5.6 are to be adjusted, than it requires an RFC
> process and should be an exception, not the rule.
> 
> But, for what it's worth - it's fine as it is. Distros will support 5.6 as
> long as they need, you can always download older versions for Windows from
> php.net archive and so on. It still has almost 2 years in security fixes
> left, and that's more than enough time for people to make a move. Others
> will just not care to do that anyway for whatever reasons, and nothing can
> be done about it.

We need to be aware that there are 3 types of user:

1) those who run PHP on a machine provided by their ISP

2) those who run their machine using software that comes ''with the operating 
system'',
   I am thinking of Linux users, mainly: RedHat, Debian, SUSE

3) those who are happy & able to upgrade their machine to the something
reasonably recent.


Those who I want to talk about are (2), they want to have their systems kept up
to date by running a daily cron job (yum update, or apt-get ...).  We cannot
rely on these systems being rebuilt, some have very long lifetimes, eg
RedHat/CentOS 7 will be supported until 2024 - and by default runs PHP 5.4

We need to persuade the distros to have PHP 7 available *in addition* to
whatever PHP 5.x they have. However: they will probably continue to support PHP 
5.x
until that version of their OS is EOLed -- which is work that they will have to 
do.

PHP 5.x will still be in use for many years: people put a machine together to do
something and then don't want to fiddle with it (which might break applications)
for as long as possible.  But also they, naturally, want bug fixes.

-- 
Alain Williams
Linux/GNU Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT 
Lecturer.
+44 (0) 787 668 0256  http://www.phcomp.co.uk/
Parliament Hill Computers Ltd. Registration Information: 
http://www.phcomp.co.uk/contact.php
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