A PHP internals mailing list discussion 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 in alpha with only ~5 weeks to feature freeze, and new ext/gd features tied to libgd-2.4 would effectively force use of the bundled library. A respondent notes the PR doesn't remove support for older system libgd versions and that feature freeze is still weeks away.
