Hi internals, Currently the PHP project doesn't have a particularly great way of letting users know when serious defects have been found in versions of PHP.
My understanding is that this has been an issue before, when defects were found in OPcache. Due to OPcache incorrectly optimizing code, bugs could spontaneously appear anywhere in users code. As we had nothing in place, we didn't have a way of communicating 'the latest version is borked, avoid it' Fortunately there were few incidents of this. However, the JIT is quite likely to have many similar issues, where either new issues, or regressions, could seriously affect the integrity of how data is processed in PHP applications. I'd like to suggest that this could be improved by having some machine readable data somewhere (see example below), that contains a list of known critical issues that people should know about before upgrading to a particular version of PHP. This would at least allow people to either hold off on upgrading from a version that works, to a known bad version, as well as do things like alert their ops team of investigating whether a newly found issue could be affecting their programs, and it might be appropriate for them to revert to a previous version of PHP. Thoughts? And does anyone know of any projects that already do this, so we can be inspired by their best practices? cheers Dan Ack btw before anyone suggests "why don't we just have more releases?", PHP is mostly distributed through package managers on a fixed schedule. Switching to an ad-hoc schedule would be a huge amount of work for many people, and doesn't like a reasonable thing to do. Example of data --------------------- [ { "version": "8.0.1", "issues": [ { "link": "https:\/\/bugs.php.net\/bug.php?id=12345", "affects": "jit" } ] }, { "version": "8.0.0", "issues": [ { "link": "https:\/\/bugs.php.net\/bug.php?id=12345", "affects": "opcache" } ] } ] The 'affects' entry could be a comma separated list of things such as: jit - the JIT opcache - opcache php - the core engine with/without JIT or OPcache. security - known security flaws that of a severity that justify an urgent upgrade -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: https://www.php.net/unsub.php