If a user visits: http://www.php.net/
They see four hyperlinks on the right hand side of the screen to download various versions of PHP. For those who know, 5.3 is EOL'ed. For those who don't know, there is very little to indicate that 5.3 has been EOL'ed. The news on the most recent 5.3 release has dropped off into the news archive, the changelog doesn't indicate EOL, and the downloads page says "Old Stable" just like 5.4 and 5.5. The only thing that indicates a possible EOL is the last time 5.3 was updated versus the other newer versions.
My own development policy is to support all versions of PHP that are easy to find. I consider an obvious link to a specific version at the top of the php.net homepage to be easy to find. I consider the archives to be more difficult to find and I drop my support for those versions accordingly. I feel like this is a rational/sensible approach to take in terms of PHP version support in my applications, but it does hold me back from accessing newer features and using certain libraries that rely on newer versions when an older version has been EOL'ed but is still hanging around.
So what is the policy for moving EOL'ed versions to the archive, including removing the binaries for Windows? If there isn't a policy, I'm in favor of something like "when the announcement about EOL falls off the front page" or "3 months after EOL" - or both if accompanied with a phrase like "whichever comes first" or "whichever comes later".
-- Thomas Hruska CubicleSoft President I've got great, time saving software that you will find useful. http://cubiclesoft.com/ -- PHP Webmaster List Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
