PHP 5.4.0 was released on 01-Mar-2012. The end of life for PHP 5.3.x is in March 2013.

The major decision factor is a) ease of getting started; b) ease of deployment.

Getting started

In case users do not have PHP 5.4.x on their local machines, we must provide install instructions. For example, OSX ships with 5.3, so we should point users to either php-osx or homebrew-php.

This seems like an acceptable requirement to me.

Deployment

It is critical that major distros ship with PHP 5.4 before we bump the requirement.

• Ubuntu and Fedora are already doing so.
• Debian will ship with it in the next release. Which will be around Feb/Mar 2013.
• I wasn't able to find any info on Centos and RedHat.

Proposal

IMO we should wait at least until debian wheezy is out. Which would mean bumping whenever that happens, hopefully within the next 2-3 months.

Feedback please.