The PHP internals mailing list is discussing the RFC for deprecations planned for PHP 8.6. Gina P. Banyard announced the compiled list of proposed deprecations, each to be voted on individually, with a freeze deadline of July 13th. A notable debate emerged around whether the proposals include adequate impact analyses. Juliette Reinders Folmer criticized the lack of proper impact analysis across the ~25 proposals, while Tim Düsterhus argued that deprecations are not breaking changes and that impact analyses are inherently biased since they can't capture positive ecosystem effects. Rowan Tommins sided with Juliette, stating any proposal without impact information would receive an automatic 'No' vote. One concrete example shared was 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.
