PHP 5.3 end of life

PHP
1

Has there been any official announcement about the end of life of PHP 5.3?

I know in the July 11, 2013 release of PHP 5.3.27, it was stated that this was the last of the development cycle for PHP 5.3 and only security updates would be released for the next year. Still I haven’t heard of an official end of life date set for PHP 5.3. I suspect it ot be sometime in June or July 2014, but I also expected to get a more concrete answer in January 2014. (I seem to recall them doing something similar with PHP 5.2’s end of life).

2

The EOL date has been pushed back several times now–it was originally March 2013! I’m not sure that anything has been set in stone yet. But, you are correct that the EOL is certainly on the horizon.

3

I just hope they announce something and give us plenty of lead time. I still have some servers that are running PHP 5.3 that I need to update to PHP 5.4, but I’ve got some other things going on that are taking priority. I can switch them to PHP 5.4, but as long as PHP 5.3 is still within it’s life-cycle, it’s not really a top priority for me.

I just thought maybe they had announced PHP 5.3 EOL and maybe I missed it, although I don’t see any mention of it on their website.

4

When you do upgrade them wouldn’t it be better to upgrade to 5.5 rather than stopping at 5.4 (or even going to 5.6 if it is released by then). That way it will be a lot longer before you need to update them for version changes again.

5

Well, PHP 5.5 still has some growing to do, I think. I know they removed a lot of functions (not saying they didn’t replace them with better ones) in PHP 5.5. I’m not sure how that will relate to WordPress and Joomla! scripts, as well as other popular scripts.

There’s also no ZendGuard for PHP 5.5 (unless one has been release recently) so that might break some things.

I agree that PHP’s development is a little… something. They’ve got PHP 5.3 which is still technically supported (if not by popular choice), PHP 5.4 which isn’t really getting new features added, PHP 5.5 which I’m not really sure what they’re doing with it, and now they’ve started working on PHP 5.6. Having that many versions available just causes a lot of issue. A better choice might have been to retire PHP 5.3 before starting on PHP 5.5, and thereby limiting the number of different versions they have available. At least, that’s my 2 cents.

6

It’s still very likely to be somewhere around late June, early July. Here’s a message from the PHP 5.3 Release Manager:

A majority of core developers agreed upon the one-year-after-5.5 date. See https://wiki.php.net/rfc/php53eol#vote

There is very little effort going towards 5.3 these days. Maintaining the 5.4, 5.5, 5.6 and master branches seems to be going mostly okay. :eye: