Ubuntu 21.10 Begins Transition To PHP 8.0 By Default

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 21.10 Begins Transition To PHP 8.0 By Default

While PHP 8.0 was released at the end of last year, it wasn't added to Ubuntu 21.04 given all the changes at play over PHP 7.4. But now for Ubuntu 21.10, that transition to PHP 8 is now happening to ensure it's in good enough shape for the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS cycle...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-21.10-PHP-8-Transition

[uid313]

I was a bit disappointed that PHP 8.0 didn't get included in Ubuntu 21.04, but glad to hear it will be included in 21.10.

PHP have had its fair share of criticism, and much of it well deserved, but I think it has been fixed and improved to the point that PHP nowadays is a really nice language.

[royce]

PHP has come a long way since the early days. I use it daily for a lot of things, alongside python and go - depending the nature of the problem to solve.

[andre30correia]

I was a bit disappointed that PHP 8.0 didn't get included in Ubuntu 21.04, but glad to hear it will be included in 21.10.

PHP have had its fair share of criticism, and much of it well deserved, but I think it has been fixed and improved to the point that PHP nowadays is a really nice language.

you can install from php, I need to see what changes in this version to port the websites for that

[gggeek]

Going against the tide here, but the upgrade from php 7 to 8 is way more involved than the jump from 5 to 7.
I am not saying that we should stick to php 7 forever, but a lot of apps will break, in hard to pinpoint ways (basically some of the subtle changes in semantic are impossible to fix or even reliably find using automated scanning tools).
I am not sure what is the planned release date for Ubuntu 21.0 - but my wish atm would be for all distros to keep packaging for a while both php 7 and php 8... (yes, there are non-distro repos out there such as remi or sury, but having the app in the base os repo makes it always easier to install it)

[creoflux]

Going against the tide here, but the upgrade from php 7 to 8 is way more involved than the jump from 5 to 7.
I am not saying that we should stick to php 7 forever, but a lot of apps will break, in hard to pinpoint ways (basically some of the subtle changes in semantic are impossible to fix or even reliably find using automated scanning tools).
I am not sure what is the planned release date for Ubuntu 21.0 - but my wish atm would be for all distros to keep packaging for a while both php 7 and php 8... (yes, there are non-distro repos out there such as remi or sury, but having the app in the base os repo makes it always easier to install it)

https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle

21.10 is October of this year. But, I suspect a lot of people stick to LTS releases and are on 20.04 still.

[jo-erlend]

I am not sure what is the planned release date for Ubuntu 21.0 - but my wish atm would be for all distros to keep packaging for a while both php 7 and php 8...

I think the plan is always to release on the second last Thursday in April and October, so I would expect Ubuntu 21.10 to be released on October 21st.

[linuxgeex]

https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle

21.10 is October of this year. But, I suspect a lot of people stick to LTS releases and are on 20.04 still.

Most developers target LTS because most professional users, ie the ones who directly or indirectly pay their wages, want minimal disruption. That means avoiding the upheaval that comes with migrating across OS releases, and that means a 4-5 year enterprise OS platform reinstall cycle, or for the adventurous, 2 year reinstall cycles. For production environments I'm targeting CentOS 7 and Ubuntu 18.04, and patching releases to work with CentOS 8 (yes, still) and Ubuntu 20.04. But my workstation runs 20.10 and has a herd of various Linuxen, plus the obligatory Mic&Mac.

What I will say is that it's disappointing that 8.0 didn't make it into 21.04 as an optional interpreter. 7.4 should be default because it's compatible. 8.0 should be there to promote early adoption, and to prevent Jane Average from having to go to untrusted 3rd party repos, or build it themselves (as I happily do.) Debian is pretty painfully slow to adopt new versions, so when they're ahead of Ubuntu... ouch.

What's great about 8.0? Not a lot really. Nothing worth the porting effort. 8.1 is a different story. Adding the Fiber class is truly transformative and will make the JIT meaningful, because now it will be worthwhile to write long-living PHP programs. The JIT is not really a benefit for short-lived programs. On the contrary it leads to frequent regressions and higher memory use, which reduces SLA levels.