PHP version retirement

[Miroslav Lachman]

Franco Fichtner wrote on 2019/08/12 08:20:

>>> 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.
>>
>> Part of the contract in providing packages includes providing support
>> for them. Other OSes provide packages for software that they can never
>> support, and there are definitely consequences for that paradigm. This
>> is doubly true for PHP, which is extremely common and for which
>> security fixes can be vitally important.
> 
> Well, you are arguing against a grace period for obsolete software which is quite pointless because the software is not bad per se. It will be eventually and it should be removed and nobody argued against that.
> 
> In the case of PHP 5.6 a clear error of judgement was made based on a reasonable decision at the time. It should give enough incentive to not let this happen again so quickly and try to learn from how it negatively impacts users.

+1 from me. Removing PHP 5.6 before the last version was released by 
upstream was very inconvenient and we end up doing 5.6.40 version 
ourself. Then deploy on servers which cannot be updated to 7.x at that time.

Miroslav Lachman