The horrible mess called PHP

[Jan Rękorajski]

Tho whoever is interested in PHP.

TL;DR Make PHP packaging sustainable or all versioned php packages will
be deleted and replaced by a single php package tracking head.

The current model of packaging PHP runtime is not sustainable.

The dependencies are a complete mess, packages (build)require
php-something, but none of the versioned phpXY-something provides
this.

This leads to a lot of manual labor when rebuilding php-pecl
packages (run this magical command for managing installed deps
and pray it works).

This also leades to even worse mess for PEAR packages. The dependency
generator needs /usr/bin/php and it gets a random one, if it gets
anything at all.

If there is a real need to keep old versions of php, then whoever needs
this, please figure out a packang model that won't require enormous
cognitive load on anyone trying to deal with randmon php packages.

You have been warned,
Your maintainer
-- 
Jan Rękorajski                    | PLD/Linux
SysAdm | baggins<at>pld-linux.org | http://www.pld-linux.org/