The Debian developers have publicly announced their plans on migrating all of the PHP 5 to the brand-new and powerful PHP 7 release, as well as on changing the PHP packaging to allow co-installable versions.

The announcement was made by Debian developer Ondřej Surý a few couple of days ago on one of Debian Project's mailing list, where he informs Debian devs about the changes made to the PHP packaging for the operating system, in the pkg-php packaging group, and it comes a few days after we've reported news on the PHP 7 plans for the upcoming version of the Ubuntu Linux operating system, the Xenial Xerus.

"If you are interested in further discussion I recommend joining pkg-php-maint, pkg-php-pecl and/or pkg-php-pear alioth mailing lists where we have discussed the changes in deeper detail," said Ondřej Surý. "We don't expect huge MBF because fortunately most of the packages are maintained withing pkg-php-pecl and pkg-php-pear, so we can fix most of the packages ourselves."

PHP 7.0 just landed in Debian Unstable

The Debian developers waste no time, and they've already pushed the PHP 7.0 packages in the Unstable branch of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system for anyone who want to help with testing. In the lengthy post, Ondřej Surý explains in detail the changes done so far to the PHP packaging, so we strongly recommend to read all nine points before getting involved.

Of course, if you can, you are urged to contributed to one of the best free operating systems in the world, and help the Debia developers throughly test the PHP 7 packages in the distribution. PHP7 is a revolution and it comes with powerful new features, and we will see more and more GNU/Linux operating systems transitioning to PHP 7 in the coming weeks or months.