PHP 7 transition: PHP support removed from GEOS & MapServer
For the ongoing transition to PHP 7 [0] PHP support has been dropped
from the geos & mapserver packages because they lack support for PHP 7.
GEOS relies on SWIG to generate the PHP bindings, and SWIG has no
support for PHP 7 yet. [1]
MapServer does not rely on SWIG for PHP MapScript, but also does not
support the PHP 7 extension API yet. [2]
The lack of PHP support for GEOS mostly affects users of geoPHP with
Drupal. The popcon score for php5-geos is low, but non-zero. [3]
The lack of PHP MapScript affects significantly more users. [4]
If PHP support 7 materializes in the next 6 months, we can get php-geos
& php-mapscript back in stretch, but for xenial it's already too late.
UbuntuGIS can play a role here to provide the packages for xenial with
PHP support once that's available again.
In case PHP 7 support is not available in time for the stretch release,
we can reintroduce php-mapscript via backports, but geos backports are
unlikely to happen.
In the mean time there is no PHP support any more. If you rely on PHP
support in these package, you should consider contributing to the PHP
support in the upstream projects.
[0] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2016/01/msg00002.html
[1] https://github.com/swig/swig/issues/571
[2] https://github.com/mapserver/mapserver/issues/5252
[3] https://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=php5-geos
[4] https://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=php5-mapscript
Kind Regards,
Bas
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