The revenge of GoPHP5 being planned

Great idea, but June 2014 is too early to force a transition to PHP 5.5. They'll need to coordinate this with major Linux distributions, otherwise lots of people will be left in the cold.

As some of the commenters noted in the original thread, Ubuntu's current LTS release runs PHP 5.3. The next LTS, which will include PHP 5.5, is not expected until April 2014. Since people are encouraged to wait until the .1 release before upgrading to the next LTS, it will probably take until the fall of 2014 for the majority of Ubuntu servers to get PHP 5.5.

Those who run Debian Stable will need to wait even longer, probably the middle of 2015, since Debian tends to take 2 years between major releases and the current Stable was released earlier this year.

Of course there are PPAs for Ubuntu and dotdeb for Debian, but people who run "stable" Linux distributions tend not to get third-party upgrades.

And let's not even get started about CentOS...

Meanwhile, PHP 5.4 and above are a pain in the ass for shared hosting services, because some "security features" like safe_mode are gone forever and now the hosts need to rethink the security model on their multi-tenant servers. It took much longer for my favorite shared host, NearlyFreeSpeech, to roll out PHP 5.4 than it took them to roll out PHP 5.3. Getting PHP 5.3 is a big deal for us developers, but from the point of view of a web host it's a relatively minor upgrade. PHP 5.4 and 5.5 are much more serious changes for web hosts.

A more realistic timeline would call for PHP 5.3 by the end of this year, followed by PHP 5.5 a year or two later, and after that all the major projects should vow to support only the 2-3 most recent minor releases. A gradual approach like this will get developers most of the features they really need, such as namespaces, late static binding, closures and Composer, as soon as possible (they're all available in PHP 5.3). The new features of PHP 5.4 and 5.5 would be nice to have, but they can wait another year or two.

A rolling support schedule would also eliminate the need to do another GoPHPX.X campaign ever again. PHP 5.5 looks nice now, but you don't want to be stuck with it 3 years later any more than you want to be stuck with IE 8. Once and for all, let's force web hosts to do regular upgrades even if you don't yell at them every single time.