Hi
Apologies for the late reply. It's been a busy May for me with
conferences and other important day job duties.
Am 2026-05-08 14:54, schrieb Eric Norris:
IMO it should be a vote for the increased minimum version with a good
argument as to why this increased minimum version is useful,
specifically “more predictable behavior for persistent connections,
because any per-connection state can cleanly be reset” and “support
for
C11 in autotools, which already is the documented minimum in
https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/8d0777e88b8494807727fc57c148c2497976eff5/CODING_STANDARDS.md?plain=1#L12,
but folks will only notice if compilation fails halfway through”.
That makes sense to me. That said, I don't personally have anything
more to say about the autoconf change, other than "it sounds like a
good idea." I will need you or someone (Peter Kokot?) who is more
knowledgeable about autoconf and the build system to write that
section if we're going to make this a combined RFC.
Something like this should hopefully work:
The officially documented minimum version of the C standard that is
supported by PHP is [C11 as of PHP
8.4](https://github.com/php/php-src/commit/631bab42ddef8e90964558fe8b1df80157e12986).
This requirement is however not explicitly checked in a programmatic
fashion, which means that users trying to build PHP with an older
compiler that does not support the C11 standard might encounter
non-obvious build failures. The currently used minimum version of
autoconf, which is the tool used to generate the ./configure script
which is used for feature detection, is 2.68 and does not yet know
about C11, preventing it from reliably detecting the minimum
requirement and associated features.
We propose increasing the minimum version of autoconf 2.71 from 2.69.
The updated version has official support for C11 and also allows to
simplify some of the existing autoconf definitions, simplifying
maintenance for the PHP Core team.
autoconf is only required when building from git. The official PHP
release tarballs contain a pre-generated ./configure script that is
generated by the release managers, thus this change does not affect
users that build from the official releases. For users that build from
git, autoconf 2.71 was released in January 2021 and is available by
default in the current stable versions for all common Linux
distributions. This includes Debian 12+ (Bookworm), Ubuntu 22.04+
(jammy), RHEL 10, Fedora 38+, Alpine Linux 3.16+, OpenSuse Leap 16.
Best regards
Tim Düsterhus
