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 notable debate emerges around whether proposals require formal impact analyses before voting. Juliette Reinders Folmer argues it is irresponsible to vote without impact data, while Tim Düsterhus counters that impact analyses are inherently biased toward negative effects and cannot capture positive ecosystem benefits. 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 actual latent bugs.
