(08-05-2015, 08:33 AM)kilishan Wrote: We are targetting PHP 7 since, at the anticipated release date, 5.6 will be in security maintenance mode and only have a few months until it becomes completely unsupported. Releasing with a target version that is almost dead would keep CI held back once more. We know this will not be a valid move to upgrade all apps to PHP 7 because of the variety of hosting situations, so the 3.x branch will be maintained for a while - much longer than the EOL window for the 2.x branch after the 3.x release.
Sooner or later we will have to break backwards compatibility and there's no better reason than the transition from PHP 5.x to PHP 7. IMHO it's perfectly ok to break backward compatibility, maybe even more often than once every decade, as long as there will be security updates for the old version. There will be many applications built on CI that no longer gets new features but that are still being maintained for a long time. Of course there can be no guarantee but knowing that there is a long term plan for security updates would be a good selling point for CI.
