Despite the remi repository still provides the PHP 5.6, 7.0 and 7.1, and even if I still plan to maintain these versions for some time (backporting some security patches, when some other repositories just planned to drop them), this doesn't suite the main goal of my repository: provide the latest versions of PHP and promote their adoption by developers and users.

More, lot of projects have already raised their requirement on minimal PHP version:

  • phpMyAdmin since version 5.0 (php 7.1)
  • PHPUnit since version 8.0 (php 7.2)
  • Symfony Framework since version 4 (php 7.1)
  • etc

And various components have security fixes which are not yet available.

To maintain various versions of applications and libraries is really a huge work. From now, they will be slowly moved to the stable repository.

If you really have to keep using an old PHP version:

  • you have to forget using recent applications and libraries, and exclude them to be installed (exclude directive in remi.conf file)
  • update the system PHP version to 7.2, and use the SCL only for legacy needs

I recommend you to plan the upgrade to a maintained version:

It seems a good idea to remind that since version 5.4, the compatibility of new versions is very good, so the upgrade is usually simple (but of course, requires some testing).

I'm a bit sad to see that more than half of the downloads are for not maintained versions.

I understand some will be happy, and some others will be frustrated, but I really hope this will encourage the upgrade to a recent version, and that download statistics will show it.

Notice: This is already the minimal version required for the Fedora and EL-8 repository, so this change is only for EL-6 and EL-7.