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 impact analyses are inherently biased since they can only measure negative impact on existing code, not positive impact on the ecosystem. Rowan Tommins sided with Juliette, stating proposals without impact data would receive automatic 'No' votes. One concrete example shared was the 'return-in-finally' deprecation, where Osama Aldemeery ran an analysis on the top ~5000 Composer packages and found only 12 affected sites across 9 packages (0.18%), with 3 being actual latent bugs.
