The Php Times

Eric Norris has opened voting on the RFC that would set minimum supported versions for PHP 8.6's dependencies. Balloting runs until 2026-07-30 15:48:00 UTC. The proposal is split into multiple questions, each deciding a separate minimum version requirement for a build or runtime dependency. The RFC text is at https://wiki.php.net/rfc/min_supported_versions_php_8_6, and the preceding discussion is at https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/131707.

Alexander Kurilo joined the thread after missing the discussion phase to challenge one of the changes: making COM_RESET_CONNECTION mandatory for MySQL/MariaDB persistent connections. He says the benefit is clear, but he considers it a backward-compatibility break because code that depends on persistent connection state could stop working silently. He also warns that users on older MySQL or MariaDB releases would see a performance hit, because their persistent connections would quietly become non-persistent. He argues that the requirement is not limited to very old databases, and that making it optional would let adopters opt in while leaving legacy deployments unaffected.

Eric Norris replied that Kurilo’s reading of the behavior is correct, but he believes the change is rare enough and safe enough to keep mandatory. He notes that MySQL 5.7.3, which would be affected, shipped on 3 December 2013. He adds that the performance impact depends on the application. He considered several ways to make the feature optional—an INI setting, silently falling back to the old behavior, or a PDO option—but rejected them as either frowned upon by internals, dangerous, or unnecessarily complex. He concludes that the safer behavior should be the default and that asking users to run modern database versions is reasonable.