

The revenge of GoPHP5 being planned - arvidj
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/php-fig/ogp03OHbVJ0

======
kijin
Great idea, but June 2014 is too early to force a transition to PHP 5.5.
They'll need to coordinate this with major Linux distributions, otherwise lots
of people will be left in the cold.

As some of the commenters noted in the original thread, Ubuntu's current LTS
release runs PHP 5.3. The next LTS, which will include PHP 5.5, is not
expected until April 2014. Since people are encouraged to wait until the .1
release before upgrading to the next LTS, it will probably take until the fall
of 2014 for the majority of Ubuntu servers to get PHP 5.5.

Those who run Debian Stable will need to wait even longer, probably the middle
of 2015, since Debian tends to take 2 years between major releases and the
current Stable was released earlier this year.

Of course there are PPAs for Ubuntu and dotdeb for Debian, but people who run
"stable" Linux distributions tend not to get third-party upgrades.

And let's not even get started about CentOS...

Meanwhile, PHP 5.4 and above are a pain in the ass for shared hosting
services, because some "security features" like safe_mode are gone forever and
now the hosts need to rethink the security model on their multi-tenant
servers. It took much longer for my favorite shared host, NearlyFreeSpeech, to
roll out PHP 5.4 than it took them to roll out PHP 5.3. Getting PHP 5.3 is a
big deal for us developers, but from the point of view of a web host it's a
relatively minor upgrade. PHP 5.4 and 5.5 are much more serious changes for
web hosts.

A more realistic timeline would call for PHP 5.3 by the end of this year,
followed by PHP 5.5 a year or two later, and after that all the major projects
should vow to support only the 2-3 most recent minor releases. A gradual
approach like this will get developers most of the features they really need,
such as namespaces, late static binding, closures and Composer, as soon as
possible (they're all available in PHP 5.3). The new features of PHP 5.4 and
5.5 would be nice to have, but they can wait another year or two.

A rolling support schedule would also eliminate the need to do another
GoPHPX.X campaign ever again. PHP 5.5 looks nice now, but you don't want to be
stuck with it 3 years later any more than you want to be stuck with IE 8. Once
and for all, let's force web hosts to do regular upgrades even if you don't
yell at them every single time.

