manu wrote:IMHO a pretty brave decision to drop support for 1.6 even we are far away from a productive 1.7. There are 73 issues on the roadmap. Do we know which core changes have consequences for existing installations.
We have
done so for 1.5 when 1.6 was still in its very early development -- nearly a year before 1.6 GA. My point of view is that it's important for everybody to schedule such dates as soon as possible for long time planning, and that the final feature set of 1.7 can still be adjusted according to our progress (one of the reasons I prefer to split the voting into "sprints").
It seems to me several other Open Source projects work similar: set a new release date in advance, and see what you're able to do until then. The PHP project has even done that for the next major version (PHP 7):
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/php7timeline. Okay, that is about the release date of the next version, and not about the EOL of the current version, but these are always somewhat related, and in our case we should have 1.7 ready when PHP 7 reaches GA, or at least shortly thereafter. It might have been better to actually hold a separate vote on the scheduled release date of 1.7, but it seems to me that we have no leeway for that, anyway.
manu wrote:Are we sure, all the important plugins are adopted and ready for 1.7 then?
No, we are not. However, it makes it easier if the plugin developers are able to plan ahead. Consider the alternative way chosen by CMSimple 4.5. On November, 21 the
first beta was released with a note that content.htm has been changed to content.php. Only a week later
4.5 reached GA. That didn't leave much time for any affected extension to catch up.
Anyhow, it might be debatable wich plugins are important, but supposedly all "old" plugins will stop working under PHP 7. I wouldn't be surprised if that'll affect a lot of technically unmaintained CMSimple installations -- it would be nice if we're able to offer them PHP 7 ready alternatives. Not that I'm expecting many to upgrade to CMSimple_XH, though.