The PHP internals mailing list thread covers the RFC for deprecations planned for PHP 8.6, compiled over the past year by multiple contributors. Each deprecation will be voted on individually, with the RFC needing to be finalized by July 13th. A notable debate emerges around whether proposals should include formal impact analyses. Juliette Reinders Folmer argues it is irresponsible to vote without impact data, while Tim Düsterhus counters that deprecations are not breaking changes and that code-based impact analyses are inherently biased toward public Packagist packages. Rowan Tommins sides with Juliette, stating proposals without impact information will receive automatic 'No' votes. 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 latent bugs.
