Dear fellow packagers, With PHP8 released a couple of weeks ago, you may have been wondering when it will be available in Factory. Good news: we're almost there. For the time being, we are going to provide both php7 and php8 packages. Due to some BC-breaking changes in PHP-8, it is expected that not all PHP packages will be able to migrate to PHP-8 yet. Therefor no automatic upgrade will be attempted. Notable change: the command-line binary will *not* be installed by default anymore when the base php7 or php8 packages are installed. Only if no sapi (mod_php, embed, fastcgi or fpm) is installed already, php-cli will be selected. So in order to guarantee the CLI is present, you need to explicitly (Build)Require (PHP version independent) 'php-cli' or '/usr/bin/php' or (PHP version dependent) 'php7-cli' or 'php8-cli' respectively. Note that only one of 'php7-cli' and 'php8-cli' can be used (due to hard-coded paths in the command-line binary /usr/bin/php). One thing that changed recently, is openssl support. We've build openssl as a shared module in PHP for years already, but until recently openssl happened to be built-in through mysqlnd (which was built-in). Now that has been fixed by building mysqlnd as a shared module as well, openssl will no longer be built-in. So if you need SSL support pretty much anywhere in PHP, you *must* require/install php-openssl. Last but not least: the base php7 and php8 packages theoretically can be installed side-by-side, as well as the 'mod_php' and 'embed' targets (and the shared PHP modules). In theory it should be possible to run multiple versions on the same system, but do note that in that case if you install (or require) shared PHP modules, you'll get the php8 version by default if you don't explicitly tell the system to use the php7 version. So although it is probably possible to run them side-by-side, it may give unexpected results and we don't recommend this. Best regards, Arjen de Korte