The PHP internals mailing list thread covers the RFC for deprecations planned in PHP 8.6. Gina P. Banyard announced the annual deprecation RFC, noting each deprecation will be voted on individually and the RFC must be frozen by July 13. A key debate emerged around whether proposals need formal 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't capture positive effects of removing harmful features. Rowan Tommins sided with Juliette, stating proposals without impact data would receive automatic 'No' votes. One concrete example shared: the 'return-in-finally' deprecation was analyzed across ~5000 top Composer packages, appearing in only 12 places across 9 packages (0.18%), with 3 being actual latent bugs.
