PHP version retirement

[Martin Waschbüsch]

> Am 10.08.2019 um 20:18 schrieb Patrick Powell <papowell at astart.com>:
> 
> Umm this was just the kick in the pants that I needed to switch to PHP 7.
> See https://www.glaver.org/blog/?p=1109 for a desperation 'I need PHP5.6' hack which I used during this update.

Thank you, Patrick,
that is a work-around I also came across. It helped me as well.

> I must say that the update to PHP 7 was relatively painless - there is PHP6 to PHP7 update support and lots of help/suggestions.   I also found an embarassing amount of bad PHP code during the update process,  something
> I should have suspected I would find.

For my own projects, this is not an issue. I do try to follow the deprecation announcements for php. The issue is one where customers insist (against my explicit advice) to continue to use outdated PHP-based software that is not easily upgraded (and probably should be replaced instead of patched).

> Note that the changes suggested by Mr. Glaver seem to be applicable to new versions of the Ports tree UPDATING and .../.mk files so you can use the latest Ports tree with the appropriate minor modifications.  You can even generate a
> script to apply these updates/mods each time you run 'portsnap'. But I digress...