On Mon, Jan 22, 2024, at 9:11 PM, Matthew Weier O'Phinney wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 22, 2024 at 12:54 PM Larry Garfield <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> I am in support of this change. My only concern is timeline. This RFC
>> would deprecate it in 8.4, and presumably support would be removed in 9.0.
>> While we haven't discussed a timeline for 9.0, historically the pattern is
>> every 5 years, which would put 9.0 after 8.4, which means only one year of
>> deprecation notices for this change.
>>
>
> This is... not true. There is literally no established pattern for when
> major releases take place, either by length of time, or number of minor
> releases.
>
> PHP 3 had no minor releases. PHP 4 had 4 minor releases before PHP 5
> dropped, and then a minor release happened AFTER PHP 5 was already in the
> wild (4.4). PHP 5 had 7 minor releases, with MULTIPLE YEARS between some of
> the minor releases before the current process was adopted towards the end
> of its lifecycle.
>
> We are moving TOWARDS a fairly standard process, but there's no definite
> plans for PHP 9 to follow after 8.4 as of yet, and the process does not
> require it.
I know there's no official statement regarding timeline. However, 5.3 (aka PHP 6) -> PHP 7
was 5 years. PHP 7 -> PHP 8 was 5 years. It's not unreasonable for folks to assume 9 comes
5 years after 8, whether that's the intention or not. Given the lengths of time involved
there's not a great many data points to work from, but humans gonna pattern match. :-)
In any case, my core point is a deprecation of this impact probably needs more than a year's
lead time before it's actually removed. If we agree on that, we should plan around that and
actually, you know, plan.
>> Given the massive amount of code that built up between 5.1 and 7.1, and
>> 7.1 and today, I worry that a year won't be enough time for legacy code to
>> clean up and it would be another "OMG you broke everything you evil
>> Internals <expletive deleted>!" like the "undefined is now warning"
>> changes
>> in 8.0. (In both cases, well-written code any time from the past decade
>> has no issue but well-written code is seemingly the minority.)
>>
>
> But I DO agree with the above. So this might be a time for us to start
> discussing if/when we want a PHP 9 to occur.
--Larry Garfield