Comment 93 for bug 1522422

Maybe it's too late to throw my hat (and opinion) in, but from a hosting/hoster perspective, that's really a double-edged sword. Of course it would be splendid, if we could migrate all customers and applications to PHP7 as soon as possible. But with PHP itself increasing the support level of PHP5.6 to almost the same EOL date that PHP7 has, wouldn't it be possible to let BOTH stay in the repositories? As both now have a distinctive namespace (php5/php7) it would be incredibly helpful for us server or hosting providers, to get our customers to migrate to the new base OS (xenial) while having the possibility to select PHP5.6 or PHP7 as their web stack. With xenial only having PHP7 packages, most of our clientel will supposedly need to stay on trusty or - even worse - has to upgrade to trusty from precise, because (as sad as that is) there are a great many procucts out there, that don't have PHP7 compatibility right now (and don't plan to in the near future). Even worse when throwing in products like ZendGuard (*shiver*) into the mix, that don't support PHP7 yet (ergo all encrypted stuff from them won't work on PHP7/xenial for some time to come).

So having both php version lines would actually be a huge blessing for hosting/server customers and easier upgrade paths.