PHP 8.0 Is Too Fresh For Fedora 34 That It Will Be Punted To F35 In The Autumn

While Fedora has been well known for years in always shipping the very latest packages in its distribution as of release even if it means using the likes of a near-final GCC compiler pre-release, developers have decided to postpone the shipping of PHP 8.0 until the autumn with their Fedora 35 release.

PHP 8.0 was released at the end of November with many new features and changes. While it released in plenty of time for getting it into Fedora 34 that is due out this spring, the Fedora developers have decided to instead focus on shipping PHP 8.0 in the fall with the succeeding Fedora 35 release.

The extra cycle sticking to PHP 7.4 for Fedora is being done to give more upstream projects time to transition their codebase to PHP 8.0 compatibility. While PHP 8.0 is evolutionary over PHP7, there are some language changes, tightening of some language behavior, and other changes that require adaptations by most large projects out there. (For those interested there is the PHP 8.0 migration guide.) As a result, Fedora is being cautious and sticking to PHP 7.4 for an extra release rather than their usual bleeding-edge behavior.

PHP 8.1 in turn should be out towards the end of this year and will then get back to the punctual Fedora adoption with Fedora 36. The Fedora 35 change proposal for PHP 8.0 is outlined via the Wiki.

For those wanting to try out PHP 8.0 on Fedora or RHEL/CentOS, there is a repository available maintained by Remi Collet who handles the Fedora packaging as well.