ORM 2 and DBAL 3 are now on Life Support
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During our Core Team Meetup in Amsterdam this week, we discussed again how to communicate the state of old release series, like ORM 2 and DBAL 3, that are still widely used but that we want you to upgrade away from.
A year ago we pushed the ORM 2 End of Life to at least February 2027 and restricted the changes that are eligible for the 2.x branch. Since then, the website has still been labelling these versions as "stable", which does not reflect that you should be planning your upgrade.
That is why we are introducing a new status for release series: Life Support.
This also replaces the planned End of Life date: instead of ending support for ORM 2 in February 2027, we will keep maintaining it under life support indefinitely, for as long as it is feasible to support new PHP versions.
What does Life Support mean?
A release series that is on life support is maintained on a best-effort basis. It only receives:
- Security fixes
- Compatibility fixes for new PHP versions
There will be no new features and no regular bug fixes in these releases anymore. Life support ends when an old release series cannot be made compatible with a new version of PHP without breaking backwards compatibility.
The credit for this idea goes to Sebastian Bergmann, who has been using this concept for PHPUnit for a while now:
Life Support means that changes will be made for an otherwise unsupported version of PHPUnit to be compatible with new versions of PHP. Life Support ends when an old version of PHPUnit cannot be made compatible with a new version of PHP without breaking backwards compatibility.
We think this is a great way to give users of old versions the confidence that their code keeps running on new PHP versions, while making it clear that the release series is not actively developed anymore.
Which versions are on Life Support?
Starting today, the following release series are on life support:
You will see the "life support" label in the versions table on the project pages, in the version switcher of the documentation, and as an alert when browsing the documentation of these versions.
What should you do?
If you are still on ORM 2 or DBAL 3, please plan your upgrade to ORM 3 and DBAL 4. The upgrade guides to DBAL 4 and upgrade guides to ORM 3 contain all the information about the changes you need to make.
If something is blocking you from upgrading, please let us know in the discussion What is blocking you from upgrading from ORM 2 to ORM 3? #12193.