PHP 7.0-RC2 is available for Debian 8 “Jessie”

On September 4th 2015, the PHP group published the second release candidate of the upcoming new major branch, PHP 7 :

PHP 7.0.0 RC 2 contains fixes for 28 reported bugs, 7 of which are security related, and altogether over 250 commits with various improvements.

PHP 7.0.0 comes with new version of the Zend Engine with features such as (incomplete list):

• Improved performance: PHP 7 is up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6
• Consistent 64-bit support
• Many fatal errors are now Exceptions
• Removal of old and unsupported SAPIs and extensions
• The null coalescing operator (??)
• Combined comparison Operator (< =>)
• Return Type Declarations
• Scalar Type Declarations
• Anonymous Classes

For more information on the new features and other changes, you can read the NEWS file, or the UPGRADING file for a complete list of upgrading notes.

I am now proud to announce that packages of PHP 7.0-RC2 are now available for Debian 8 “Jessie” on amd64 and i386 architectures!

Disclaimer : THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT PREVIEW (from a PHP upstream and from a Dotdeb/Debian packaging perspectives) – DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!

On the Dotdeb side, I wanted to make things right and compatible with what will happen for Stretch. So the packaging method has been synchronized to Sid’s one in terms of naming and versioning (once again, thanks to the Debian maintainers for their awesome work!). That means that :

• The SAPI packages (Apache2, FPM, CLI, CGI, Embed…) are built as usual from the upstream source, and are named php7.0-* instead of just php7-*.
• This new naming convention and packaging method will help to produce future php7.x-* packages more easily. And you could even install several PHP versions on the same server without any conflict!
• Main PHP modules (GD, MySQL, mbstring…) are now built from a php7.0-modules-source package and named php-*. Please make sure that you pick the right ones.
• All these packages are built using git-buildpackage and Jenkins.
• Packages of the PECL extensions are missing and still require some work (the scripts are not ready yet).
• The thread-safe version of all these packages will be published once everything has been declared as stable and production-ready

Once again, these first packages should be seen as a preview :

• Don’t upgrade any staging/production/critical environments yet, and use these RC packages at your own risk!
• Make sure that you understand the above PHP/Debian/Dotdeb changes and that you don’t need any of the missing features/packages
• Your feedbacks are always welcome. Just make sure they are useful.

These packages have been published on the main repository for Jessie because they have new names and they shouldn’t conflict with any PHP5 installation. So to test PHP 7.0-RC2 , just follow the instructions.

And as usual, feel free to show your support…