PHP Support Roadmap Plans

[jrebs]

A large update to the documentation for this project is forthcoming and one new addition to this is going to be a roadmap with plans to drop support for versions of PHP that are out of security support.

As a reference, this is PHP's official support calendar: https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php

PHP 5 has been completely unsupported since the end of 2018, so the time has come to stop ensuring it is supported in new versions of this package (of course you'll still be able to use the current versions as long as you like).

The plan is to stop officially supporting PHP5 with the first 2021_1 build. If you won't or can't upgrade your environment from PHP5, then v2020.2.0 (the most recent release at the time of writing this post) will be the final release that be supported until upgrading.

Tentatively, we will plan to require PHP8 or higher as of the v2023.1.0 build.

If anyone has any strong arguments against this, feel free to discuss it here, but it may be hard to argue that it is vital that you be running the most bleeding edge web services releases when you are running a PHP distribution that hasn't seen a security patch for roughly 3 years. ;)