They sound like justifications for 5.6 support being extended.

I think there are good reasons to stick to schedule for 7.4: 8.0 is certain

to contain JIT, 7.4 is not, but should 7.4 get the JIT then it will be

experimental, and because of ABI guarantees and BC concerns will be more or

less stale in the 7.4 branch, with a focus on 8. It will not be good to

have an experimental feature being used in production for an additional

year. If 7.4 doesn't get the JIT then that's a really good reason to

upgrade to 8, which will help adoption, and extending support will harm

adoption.

The upgrade from 7.4 to 8 for tools like smarty should be relatively

painless, if any changes are needed at all they will be quick and easy. The

same for third party extensions most likely ... This isn't comparable to

5.6 to 7 where rather a lot of extension code needed to be rewritten, and

userland code may have been broken.

What is clear is that we should not be adjusting policy with extended

support for the last release in a series, if we are going to extend support

then it should be for reasons beyond "it's the final release in this

series".

Cheers

Joe