Symfony 3 currently requires PHP 5.5.9 or higher. However, official support for 5.5 ended 4 months ago, and security fixes will no longer be added after July 2016.

From what I can tell, the 5.5.9 requirement was chosen because it's the minimum version available for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. While I do understand that supporting these LTS users is important, I wonder whether that outweighs the fact that Symfony is explicitly supporting a now-unsupported version of PHP, especially when upgrading to PHP 5.6 isn't too difficult.

I'm therefore curious what your thoughts would be on dropping support for 5.5 and requiring 5.6+ instead.

Pros for bumping min version to 5.6:

• Symfony's PHP support will align with the currently-supported PHP versions
  • No need to support 5.5 throughout the entire lifetime of Symfony 3
  • Encourages the community to upgrade to a modern PHP version
• PHP 5.5 / Ubuntu 14.04 users can still upgrade to Symfony 2.8 and use the latest features

Cons:

• Anyone not willing/able to upgrade from 5.5 to 5.6 will be stuck on Symfony 3.x
• This decision may affect other projects relying on components from 3.0

I'm not strongly against 5.5 support - I just wanted to see how others feel about this.

Perhaps it would be okay to drop 5.5 support if (for whatever reason) Symfony 3.0.0 is released after Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (assuming it ships with PHP 5.6 or 7.0)?