Hey Marco, On Wed, Jan 26, 2022 at 1:20 PM Marco Pivetta <ocram...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey Jakub, > > On Wed, Jan 26, 2022 at 1:58 PM Jakub Zelenka <bu...@php.net> wrote: > >> > >> > PHP 9.0, likely a few years away at this point, is our next opportunity >> > to make significant breaking changes. >> > >> >> Maybe we should give users a bit more time for adoption and consider major >> version bump when PHP 8 has got at least 80% and the PHP 5 usage is close >> to zero. I know that it's hard to get exact numbers but estimates like [1] >> or even packagist stats like [2] (I'm aware that not every project uses >> composer but still better than nothing) could give us some idea. I'm >> mainly >> worried that we could introduce too many breaking changes that make >> migrations (especially for old projects) much harder. >> >> [1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php >> [2] https://blog.packagist.com/php-versions-stats-2021-1-edition/ >> > > A more updated statistic: > https://stitcher.io/blog/php-version-stats-january-2022 > > Continuously generated output at https://packagist.org/php-statistics > > Thanks for those more up to date stats. Thinking about it, it probably more shows what PHP versions is the current development on but probably doesn't reflect the amount of code running in production. I think it's logical that the older versions won't get too many updates so there won't be that many installs. It's still useful metric to have though. > I also maintain a number of PHP 5 (closed-source) projects that don't use > packagist nor composer, but that's really just their problem, as they will > need to upgrade to ~7.0.0 first anyway. > Yeah althought they will loose PHP 7 docs once we go to PHP 9 but don't think that PHP 5 users are such a big worry due to distro support (see below). > Also, my customers are gently asked to sign a piece of paper in which I'm > not responsible for their bad security awareness. > For those projects, should it be needed, Zend provides commercial support > as a "OMG WE DON'T ACTUALLY WANT TO PAY TO ACTUALLY IMPROVE OUR CRITICAL > INFRASTRUCTURE" last resort. > I think RHEL 7 still supports (provides security updates) PHP 5.4 from what I read. It's support ends in 2024 which would be probably ok for us. I see bigger issue with PHP 7 users as RHEL 8 is shipped with 7.2 so support for that version should be there until 2029. The PHP 7.4 support will be even longer for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS which should end in 2030. Please correct me if I'm wrong as this just what I googled. :) What I want to say is that those LTS users should still have an easy path to update and ideally we should keep the docs available for them. It already happened for PHP 5 users and it might mean that some of those users will never update and possibly change the language. Also we should not forget that there was much bigger motivation to update from 5 to 7 than it is from 7 to 8 due to perf improvements and if w3techs is partially correct, than 20% is still a lot. I think we could try to support the PHP 7 LTS users better. I realise that waiting till 2030 might be too long but 2025 sounds too soon. Maybe something like 2028 or 2027 would be more sensible. Regards Jakub
