The PHP internals mailing list thread covers the RFC for deprecations planned in PHP 8.6, compiled from proposals submitted over the past year. Each deprecation will be voted on individually, with a freeze deadline of July 13th. A key debate emerges around whether proposals require formal impact analyses before voting. Juliette Reinders Folmer argues it is irresponsible to vote without impact data and offers to help using PHP_CodeSniffer and PHPCompatibility. Tim Düsterhus counters that impact analyses are inherently biased since they can only measure negative impact on existing code, not positive impact on language clarity and maintainability. Rowan Tommins sides with Juliette, stating any proposal lacking impact information will receive an automatic 'No' vote. One concrete example shared is the 'return-in-finally' deprecation, where an analysis of ~5000 Composer packages found only 12 affected sites across 9 packages (0.18%), with 3 being actual latent bugs.
