PHP release schedule

[scott]

Why does it take so long?

[scott]

I hope this doesnt sound too much like a complaint. I suppose it is a complaint, but Im genuinely looking for information.

Why does it take so long for new PHP versions to be released?

PHP released PHP 5.6.21 on April 28th. It took 6 days for alt-php to be updated to 5.6.21 and thats just in the beta channel. It still hasnt been released to the stable channels.

Was there really that many changes between PHP 5.6.20 and PHP 5.6.21? Were not talking about a major PHP release.

When I was controlling PHP through source compiles, I updated PHP on our servers as soon as a new version was released. At least in terms of minor releases. Generally speaking changes from a minor version, like PHP 5.6.20 to PHP 5.6.21, were security related or just extremely minor.

Perhaps CloudLinux puts PHP through a bunch of patches, but do the changes in minor PHP releases really affect those patches?

[iseletsk]

It is a combination of the issues (and we will try to address them)
1. We have internal policy of not releasing anything on Friday (unless it is critical)
2. PHP gets released on Thursday - and due to testing we do, we simply dont hav
e time to prepare it before Friday
3. This time around Mon & Tue were national holidays in Ukraine, that also delay
ed things.

It will improve:
1. We will start putting things in beta on Friday. Most likely things like PHP &
kernel. Not LVE Manager/etc.... The main idea is not to have support requests t
hat require developers on weekends
2. We have started to invest significantly in automated testing for pretty much everything about 6 months ago. I think we should mostly be done with baseline in another 6 months. This would significantly speed up time it takes to test PHP anyway. This should allow us to release PHP on Thursday to beta.
3. Our php releases from php.net (bugfix releases) always work. I dont remember one that broke anything for a while. We might go straight to production releases at some point ... yet, the level of automated testing we have to achieve to do
that is not there yet.