PHP internals mailing list discussion about the RFC proposing a batch of deprecations for PHP 8.6. Gina P. Banyard announced the 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 before voting. Juliette Reinders Folmer argued it is irresponsible to vote without impact data and offered to help using PHP_CodeSniffer and PHPCompatibility. Tim Düsterhus countered that impact analyses are inherently biased since they can only measure negative impact on existing code, not positive impact on the ecosystem or future developers. Rowan Tommins sided with Juliette, stating any proposal lacking impact information would receive an automatic 'No' vote. 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 latent bugs.
