Comment 47 for bug 1522422

So, nothing "official" to provide yet, but I wanted to keep everyone updated.

Based upon feedback from various teams (including security and the archive administrators), it is not tenable for two versions of PHP to live in main.

Given the positive feedback received here for PHP7.0 being available at all, I'm working hard to get a PPA going that would allow PHP7.0 to transition to main, which would also remove PHP5 from main (if/when we go down that path). Primarily, this is verifying all the various reverse-depends on php5* packages are migrated, etc. Also, many many packages in universe must be rebuilt, to pull in the new php* packages for PHP7 support.

The PPA is at https://launchpad.net/~php-ubuntu/+archive/ubuntu/php7.0, but please do not use it for any production-like systems! It is undergoing fairly heavy churn and is intended to be a holding place as I go through and rebuild/bootstrap packages.

Our current state is that phpunit is now installable, but there are several unit tests failing in two stacks, doctrine & symfony. Unfortunately, they form a build-depends cycle and I'm working to bootstrap them up to fully functional versions.

Once we have this base layer of common build-depends packages done, I'm hopeful that we can automate most of the remaining package rebuilds. Then it's just a matter of triaging the failed rebuilds, which I will hopefully get some assistance from our awesome community with!

I'll send out another update once symfony & doctrine have been bootstrapped and the automation has been kicked off.

And then finally, once we do have this "live" somewhere, we'll need to seriously test and consider all the upgrade paths to ensure the transition is as seamless as possible.

Again, no official decision has been made, but I'm working hard that whatever decision is reached, it won't be due to some technical limitations of the packaging wrt. PHP7.0.

-Nish