Comment 124 for bug 1522422

On 12.04.2016 [09:28:47 -0000], bhat3 wrote:
> @Nish thanks for clarification :) I can fully understand the decision,
> but it's still a burden for any PHP5 project there having only a three
> year LTS from Ubuntu left. Just been to a Drupal Conference this weekend
> and for example we will probably never see Drupal 7 in production "on
> anything" other than trusty or in the long run CentOS/RHEL (they will
> support PHP5 the ultralong enterprise way).

3 years *should* be sufficient time to move to PHP7.0 -- but that's just
my opinion (and wouldn't PHP5 be out of support by then anyways?)

Ack on Drupal 7 -- I have a test build of Drupal 8 (which does support
PHP7 at https://launchpad.net/~nacc/+archive/ubuntu/php7 if people want
to test/verify). Upstream Drupal 7 is still not passing all tests with
PHP7 last I checked, so we've left it broken for now in the archive.

> Anyway great to have PHP 7.0 in and big thanks for all you effort. Now
> the whole PHP community needs to migrate to PHP7 and all data centers
> will be happy then running xenial :)

That would be easiest :)

> BTW: My personal burden is that i can't update all our trusty servers to
> xenial now and can't finally consolidate to systemd (having also RHEL
> servers). In general that means a big maintenance burden to Ubuntu
> admins, as you will not only start to have two production systems but
> also two staging and two development systems with xenial and trusty. So
> while PHP7 has 2x times less resource usage i will have 2x times
> resources spend on not being able to consolidating and combining all
> servers to Ubuntu 16.04 ;) ;) ;)

Might I suggest (I don't know any or all of the details of your customer
requirements) investigating using lxd or adapt to provide Trusty in a
container (or if you need more specific requirements a VM?) and use port
manipulation to redirect to the host webserver? Then you should be able
to server PHP5 and PHP7 websites from the same installation, with both
being fully supported.

If I find some time this week or next, maybe I'll work on a blog post or
something that will help document such a configuration, at least as an
example. I will also see if I can find some way to document the
performance impact.