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. Key discussion points include: a call for proper impact analyses for each proposal (with the 'return-in-finally' deprecation cited as the only positive example, affecting just 0.18% of top Composer packages); controversy over deprecating the _() alias for gettext() due to widespread use; debate over deprecating 'let' as an identifier; questions about CURLOPT_PROGRESSFUNCTION deprecation (already deprecated in libcurl since 7.32.0, with CURLOPT_XFERINFOFUNCTION as replacement); and concerns about deprecating ArrayIterator methods and by-reference return modifier changes via inheritance.
