As a long-time PHP developer, its way too fast. We're forced to constantly upgrade for features that don't really matter for most uses, but aren't backwards compatible.
Some applications might be easy to upgrade. Others will not. You are forced to do work, because for some minority it feels nicer when they get to use that new feature. And it has to look a certain way, no matter the cost! Some of the stuff that’s comming will be even worse.
The even bigger issue is that your underlying tool breaks, which has an impact on dependecies as well. Foo needs version N now, but you also depend on Bar which only works with N-1.
It’s not fun, and it’s expensive.
You are under no obligation to upgrade your php version as soon as released without being able to plan for it. PHP 8.1.17 was released alongside 8.2.4 for exemple.
However, I had to migrate some 30k LOC app from Dotnet 3 to 6 this year and it was quite straight forward. Not that many thinks broke, and when then they were in the bootstrapping of the app.
I'm not that much into PHP anymore, so my take might be wrong. I wouldn't like to upgrade each year to a new version which breaks syntax. I would be ok to migrate every 3 or 4 years from LTS to LTS.
To use the latest PHP 8.2 version Debian or Ubuntu users need to add an external package source, meant specifically to be "on the edge" for PHP, deb.sury.org
But GP comment is not that, it reeks of "old man yells at cloud" with zero mention of what is an issue and what isn't.
5.x -> 7+ was a pain, mainly down to those projects being without composer or other really suspect practices that need fixing at the same time. Much of the actual issue was due to particular string concatenation methods or the mysql_* lib which is easily shimmed to something like PDO.
> 5.x -> 7+ was a pain, mainly down to those projects being without composer or other really suspect practices that need fixing at the same time. Much of the actual issue was due to particular string concatenation methods or the mysql_* lib which is easily shimmed to something like PDO.
That's what I meant in my other comment, while it's true, mysql_ was already being removed in favor or PDO in PHP 5's time, and PHP 5 to PHP 7 was almost a decade of developpement, so I don't think it's fair to put these issues on "too fast a developpement cycle".
What kind of things are you having problems with in regards to backwards compatibility?
You know they'll pull the same crap just as fast next time.
The one time you actually may have had to work on things was with PHP 7, but that's because they finally removed things that had been deprecated for years, some for over a decade, and all of them were security risks or massive code smell anyway.
The one thing with PHP 8 was the removal of dynamic propery, and again that's a massive code smell that was holding the language back. Any code still using it when PHP 8 released was either written over a decade ago, or something that has way more issues than that with upgrading.