article --summary
The summary
The PHP release managers have scheduled one more release candidate, PHP 8.6.0 RC6, ahead of the general availability release planned for next week. The reason is an ABI incompatibility that the php2shell security fix introduced in PHP 8.6 only, which went unnoticed until now. Under the project's release policy, that change requires bumping the API version number, so compiled extensions will need to be rebuilt.
The team says an extra candidate the week before release has happened before, most recently with PHP 8.5, and they are following that approach here. The added RC also gives them room to cherry-pick a few more fixes into the 8.6.0 release.
Editorial note: This is a summary of an article first published by PHP News. The full piece is on their site.