Just like our older discussion about the drop of PHP 5, let's do the same for planning the drop of PHP 7.

As of FreshRSS 1.22.0, we support PHP 7.2+.

At the time of writing, PHP 7.4 is the most common version for WordPress https://wordpress.org/about/stats/#php_versions
Same according to w3techs statistics: https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_details/pl-php/all/q

But here are some notes already:

• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS supports PHP 8.1 https://packages.ubuntu.com/jammy/php
  • Ubuntu 20.04 LTS supports PHP 7.4 https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/php until April 2025 (but will become 3rd oldest LTS by April 2024)
• Debian 12 supports PHP 8.2+ https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/php , but at the time of writing, has not yet landed in e.g. Raspberry Pi OS.
  • Debian 11 supports 7.4 https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/php until June 2024 (LTS until June 2026)
• Alpine 3.18 supports PHP 8.2
  • Alpine 3.16 supports PHP 8.1 https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=php81&branch=v3.16&arch=x86_64
• Red Hat RHEL-9 supports PHP 8.1
  • REHL-8 with PHP 8.0 ends its maintenance level 2 in June 2024.
• Fedora 37 supports PHP 8.1 https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/php/php/
• Synology DSM 7 supports PHP 8.2 https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/packages?search=php
  • DSM 6 is stuck to PHP 7.4 (might require a change of hardware for NAS models such as DS215j ?)
• FreeBSD 12 and 13 support PHP 8.1

There are plenty of interesting features to look forward to:

• https://www.php.net/releases/7_4_0.php
• https://www.php.net/releases/8.0/en.php
• https://www.php.net/releases/8.1/en.php

Based on this data, it seems to make sense to skip some PHP versions and jump from PHP 7.2 (now) to 7.4 (after Raspberry Pi OS 12, winter 2023) and then to 8.1 (after release of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and after end of normal Debian 11 and REHL-8 support, and then awaiting maybe a bit some better usage statistics). That is to say skipping PHP 7.3 and then PHP 8.0 as well.
https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS/milestones