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Ubuntu 20.04 reaches end of standard support in April 2025 and so has some life left in it yet. At present (Sept 2022), Ubuntu provides php 7.4 as the default php package for Ubuntu 20.04 and doesn't provide any php8.0 or php8.1 packages. php itself will only provide security support for php 7.4 until 28 November 2022, although Ubuntu may choose to provide security support beyond that date.

To aid planning, is someone able to say:

  1. when Ubuntu will cease to provide security support for php 7.4,
  2. if and when php 8.0 or 8.1 packages will become selectable alongside php 7.4, and
  3. when php 7.4 will be dropped completely in favour of php 8.x

on Ubuntu 20.04?

Thanks.

Fred
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1 Answers1

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Never going to happen unless you do it yourself. 20.04 will stick to 7.4 with security updates. From StableReleaseUpdates:

Once an Ubuntu release has been completed and published, updates for it are only released under certain circumstances, and must follow a special procedure called a "stable release update" or SRU.

Users of the official release, in contrast, expect a high degree of stability. They use their Ubuntu system for their day-to-day work, and problems they experience with it can be extremely disruptive. Many of them are less experienced with Ubuntu and with Linux, and expect a reliable system which does not require their intervention.

Stable release updates are automatically recommended to a very large number of users, and so it is critically important to treat them with great caution. Therefore, when updates are proposed, they must be accompanied by a strong rationale and present a low risk of regressions.

"It's just a one-line change!"

Even the simplest of changes can cause unexpected regressions due to lurking problems:

...

High-impact bugs

Stable release updates will, in general, only be issued in order to fix high-impact bugs. Examples of such bugs include:

...

See the link for more on this.

The packages list shows:

bionic (18.04LTS) (php): 1:7.2+60ubuntu1: all
focal (20.04LTS) (php): 2:7.4+75: all
impish (21.10) (php): 2:8.0+82~0build1: all
jammy (22.04LTS) (php): 2:8.1+92ubuntu1: all
kinetic (php): 2:8.1+92ubuntu1: all

The version is shown behind the : so for 8.0 you need at least 22.04 (assuming LTS only)

You can install php8 yourself if you really want it but I would advice upgrading to 22.04.

If you want to be independent of php used in Ubuntu you can also install a tarball in /opt and have that migrate through different versions (you can have a setup like /opt/php/, /opt/php-7.4. /opt/php-8.1/ where /opt/php/ and put a symlink in /usr/bin/ that points to /opt/php and that one holds a symlink to the active php version in the 2 other directories.

Rinzwind
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