The Debian developers have publicly announced their plans to migrate all of the PHP 5 to the brand new and powerful PHP 7 release, as well as to change the PHP packaging to allow co-installable versions.

The announcement was made by Debian developer Ondřej Surý a few couple of days ago on one of Debian Project's mailing lists, where he informs Debian devs about the changes made to the PHP packaging for the operating system, in the pkg-php packaging group. It actually comes a few days after we had reported on PHP 7's plans for the upcoming version of the Ubuntu Linux operating system, the Xenial Xerus.

"If you are interested in further discussion I recommend joining pkg-php-maint, pkg-php-pecl and/or pkg-php-pear alioth mailing lists where we have discussed the changes in deeper detail," said Ondřej Surý. "We don't expect huge MBF because fortunately most of the packages are maintained withing pkg-php-pecl and pkg-php-pear, so we can fix most of the packages ourselves."

PHP 7.0 has just landed in Debian Unstable

The Debian developers waste no time, and they have already pushed the PHP 7.0 packages in the Unstable branch of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system for anyone who wants to help with testing. In the lengthy post, Ondřej Surý explains in detail the changes done so far to the PHP packaging, so we strongly recommend you to read all nine points before getting involved.

Of course, if you can, you are urged to contribute to one of the best free operating systems in the world and help the Debian developers thoroughly test the PHP 7 packages in the distribution. PHP7 is a revolution, and it comes with powerful new features, and we will see more and more GNU/Linux operating systems transitioning to PHP 7 in the coming weeks or months.