Hi!

The PHP.net website has in the last 20 years made use of an extensive

network of mirrors_ to make the PHP documentation available, and

distribute source tarballs_. These mirrors have been maintained by

members and companies in the PHP eco-system for many valuable years.

However, the administration of the mirror system is often haphazard,

with few contributors helping out—PHP is Open Source, and this is simply

how these things can go.

Maintaining the mirrors is now no longer sustainable, and also hinders

the take up of moving the PHP.net website fully to HTTPS. Because the

PHP.net team has no access to the mirror servers, we also can't make

sure the mirrors are up-to-date, and some mirrors are still running PHP

5.3 (actually, about 25% still run PHP 5.3!).

It is likely no longer necessary to have a mirror system in place, as

unlike 20 years ago, it is not nearly has hard as setting up a

distributed cache system. As a matter of fact, some of the PHP.net web

site, through http://www.php.net/, already sits behind a Content

Delivery Network (CDN) from Myra_, which is sponsored by long time PHP

contributor Sascha Schumann.

With these preliminaries out of the way, I would therefore like to

announce the discontinuation of PHP.net's mirroring program. Instead of

having mirrors, we are moving all of PHP.net to HTTPS (and get rid of

https://secure.php.net), and move them behind Myra's CDN, with the same

local content delivery opportunities, but at significantly less

administration requirements.

In the next week or so, I will e-mail out a plan on which steps are

necessary for this move. I'd be happy to hear any comments on when the

plan comes out.

To end this email, I would very much like to thank all the mirror

maintainers for their dedication, time, and bandwidth over all these

years. Thanks!

cheers,

Derick

.. _mirrors: http://php.net/mirrors.php

.. _tarballs: http://uk3.php.net/downloads.php

.. _Myra: https://myracloud.com/en/

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