PHP version retirement

[Franco Fichtner]

Quarterly is essentially useless if the decision is to immediately axe a deprecated release. 3 months are nothing in production environments, if you get 3 months (1,5 months mean) at all and also all other updates and security relevant bug fixes in the same quarterly that you desperately need.

Yeah, we know that won’t happen so please don’t suggest it.

That deprecation policy is nice and well all by itself except when it wreaks havoc over the ports infrastructure like in the case of PHP version support where numerous ports are immediately unavailable and incompatible with upgrades.

Furthermore, the argument that it is more more work to maintain an abandoned version is silly because it’s more work to delete a port that to just keep it in the tree for a while longer.

That „while“ is debatable, but it’s neither indefinitely nor immediately. The people responsible for FreeBSD ports and packages would be wise to enrich their policies with a more graceful way of dealing with legacy software, especially if it relates to more than a handful of ports in a single deprecation decision.

TL;DR: don’t remove PHP ports prematurely and you’ll have less work reading mails like these.


Cheers,
Franco

> On 11. Aug 2019, at 21:41, Martin Waschbüsch <martin at waschbuesch.de> wrote:
> 
> Hi Wolfgang,
> 
>> Am 11.08.2019 um 01:12 schrieb Wolfgang Zenker <wolfgang at lyxys.ka.sub.org>:
>> 
>> * Martin Waschbüsch <martin at waschbuesch.de> [190811 00:47]:
>>>> 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.
>> 
>> You could also have used the quarterly branch, which keeps software till
>> the end of the quarter. In the case of php 5.6 it would have given you
>> time until March 31st, and would have included version 5.6.40
>> 
>> Wolfgang
> 
> 
> 5.6.40 never made it into the main ports tree. Are you sure it was available in the quarterly snapshot?
> 
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