On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 4:03 PM, Zeev Suraski <vsura...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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. > > I think it makes sense for big engine changes that you described but I don't think this should be the case for features in core extensions and SAPI's. The thing is that some of us are not going to work on those big changes for various reasons. Personally I work mainly on fpm, openssl as well as some other stuff and just don't have time to do anything else atm. My features are not really so big that they should wait 2 years. The thing is that this type of changes won't usually conflict with engine changes so there should be no reason to delay it. So I think it would be good idea to lock the engine (possibly create a special branch for all the new changes into it) and release 7.4 and maybe 7.5 (in case 8.0 is not ready in time) with just deprecations and features in extensions and SAPI's. Cheers Jakub
