On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 5:57 PM Christoph M. Becker <cmbecke...@gmx.de> wrote:
> On 25.06.2018 at 14:30, Zeev Suraski wrote: > > > What this list is - a collection of directions around which we've > performed varying amounts of research (some of them quite a lot, like JIT), > that I think is strong grounds for us to start discussing a PHP 8 timeline, > and making PHP 7.3 the last feature release in the PHP 7.x family. If we > had to come up with an educated guess as to when PHP 8 could be ready to be > released based on the abovementioned featureset, we're probably talking > about 2-2.5yrs away (i.e. mid/late 2020). We can also consider having a > very slim PHP 7.4 release sometime in 2019 that wouldn't add any > functionality, but that would give us an opportunity to deprecate anything > that we missed in 7.3 that truly requires deprecation - while still > allowing folks to prepare for 8.0 ahead of time. > > Why not stick with our yearly release cycle, and ship 7.4.0 in Dec 2019 > and 8.0.0 in Dec 2020? > We could and I think we should, but I don't think 7.4 should be a feature release - but rather another release where we can deprecate things without rushing them into 7.3, and at the same time provide people with a smoother upgrade path to 8.0 (even though as you know, I'm not the biggest fan of compatibility breakages...). We've never been successful at working on two active-development branches at the same time, and with the resource levels we have - I don't think it's practical. To be perfectly honest, I don't think our userbase for the most part is actually consuming the feature releases at nearly the frequency that we're producing them. It's a healthy release cycle, but I really don't think that there would be any meaningful downside to have two years between the last feature-release 7.x and 8.0. Zeev
