as you mentioned distros lock in to a specific micro version, so if we introduce this deprecated messages in random micro version, we make it less likely for the users to stumble upon those deprecated messages and it will be also harder for us to communicate the upgrade path:
compare: okay, you only have to install PHP 5.7 check out the deprecated messages in your error logs, fix those and you are ready to upgrade to 7.0 vs okay, so install 5.6, but make sure that it is >= 5.6.x, except for distro Z, because they bumped the version but only backported the security fixes but did not include the last deprecated message and if you fixed those deprecated messages from your error log, you are ready to upgrade to 7.0. [Zeev] Distros don’t bump the version number when they backport patches from newer versions. It stays the same, which is why I don’t think there’s any difference between the two as far as communications is concerned. It’s really ‘Upgrade to 5.7’ vs. ‘Upgrade to 5.6.12 or later’ – both messages by the way irrelevant to distro users (which have little or no control over the version of PHP they’re using, unless they break away from the standard distro PHP). The people we really talk about are the people they build their own or otherwise obtain non-standard-distro binaries. For them, I do believe a jump to 5.7.x will be psychologically bigger than a hop to a newer 5.6.x version.
