For "modern" PHP branches (5.3 onwards), we'll base whether they're considered
active purely off the support dates for the branch. To ensure that we don't
immediately remove the download links for EOL branches from the front page,
we'll still consider them "active" for those purposes for 28 days after the
final release.
Basically, rather than having two sources of truth for whether a branch is EOL
or not (the flag and the support dates in branches.inc), we now have one (the
support dates). This should be an improvement.
We can revert this once 5.4 has been moved to $OLDRELEASES, which will take
place once Stas confirms that there won't be an additional release, since the
door was left open in the 5.4.45 announcement.
a comprehensive list of security vulnerabilities in old branches!) that was
there to demonstrate branch notes and replace it with a more generic statement
about PHP 4 now being dead.
Adam Harvey