A discussion on the PHP internals mailing list raises concerns about syncing PHP's bundled libgd to the unreleased upstream 2.4.0. The bundled libgd has diverged significantly from upstream since its GD-2.0 base, with custom memory allocators and cherry-picked backports. The proposed PR (GH-22532) introduces 137 changed files and over 142k insertions. Key concerns include: the new libgd 2.4 code is less than a month old, it has never been officially released or tagged, PHP 8.6 is already at alpha1 leaving little testing time, and new ext/gd features tied to libgd-2.4 would force use of the bundled version. Respondents are split — one argues syncing releases would be beneficial and an AI review has already found issues being addressed, while another recommends waiting until libgd 2.4 is officially released before merging into the next PHP version.
