Title: Deprecation and removal of PHP 5.6
Author: Brian Evans <grknight@gentoo.org>
Posted: 2019-08-30
Revision: 2
News-Item-Format: 2.0
Display-If-Installed: dev-lang/php:5.6
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The Gentoo PHP Team is announcing the deprecation and future removal of
PHP 5.6. As of October 1, 2019, PHP 5.6 will be masked for removal.
Since some may consider this a critical package, we have decided on a
longer than normal 90 day removal period.

Other distributions have already or will have moved to PHP 7.2 by the end of
the year.  Currently, we are using a backport repository to keep
security updates in line with the main releases.  However, we feel this
is the right time to remove this branch as maintenance burden will
likely only increase.

To that end, the long list of PHP 5 only extensions must accompany its
removal. Many of which are long ignored by their upstream maintainers
and have no replacements.  Some packages listed here have PHP 5 only
slots which are included as reminders to upgrade.

Some packages do have replacements:
dev-php/pecl-memcache can be replaced by dev-php/pecl-memcached with
  some small code modifications
dev-php/pecl-mongo has been superceded by dev-php/pecl-mongodb
dev-php/pecl-libevent should be replaced by dev-php/pecl-event
  with code changes
dev-php/PEAR-MDB2_Driver_mysql should be easily replaced by
  dev-php/PEAR-MDB2_Driver_mysqli with minor configuration changes