Track PHP 8.1 support in hosting and distributions

Added two new screenshots to the issue summary.

17% of Drupal 10 sites are on PHP 8.2, 83% on PHP 8.1, not really any other options.

47% of Drupal 9 sites are on PHP 8.1, 23% use PHP 8.0, 26% are on PHP 7.4

PHP 8.1 has gone from ~10% to ~50% of Drupal 9 sites in the past eight months, so that is not bad progress overall.

This means ~50% of Drupal 9 sites can't currently update on their present infrastructure, but there's also rapid adoption of PHP 8.1 which suggests lots of them are getting ready or at least off 7.4. Main question I guess is how many are left on PHP 8.0 and PHP 7.4 in November/December.

I think we should keep this open still, but not critical any more, so moving to major. We should also start a similar issue for Drupal 11 PHP requirement support.

I was surprised to see so many Drupal 10 sites on PHP 8.2, but it kind of makes sense given they were released around the same time, so for people starting brand new sites (or migrating from to Drupal 7) it would be an easy choice.

Fixing the order of images in the image summary.

There's an interesting thing (depending on your definition of interesting) happening on packagist with Drupal 9 php stats:
https://packagist.org/packages/drupal/core/php-stats#9

At the end of 2023, PHP 7.4 was 16% of installs with PHP 8.1 at 65% and PHP 8.0 at 10%

Now PHP 7.4 is 29% of installs, PHP 8.1 is 53% and PHP 8.2 is 7.5%, PHP 8.0 down to less than 5%.

So PHP 7.4 usage is a higher percentage, while PHP 8.0 has been almost squeezed out by 8.1 and 8.2.

Drupal 9 usage has gone down by approximately 30-40,000 in the same time period as sites update to Drupal 10.

So what this shows is that the sites that were already on PHP 8.0 or PHP 8.1 have either updated to Drupal 10 already, or in some cases updated to PHP 8.2 (likely in preparation for a 10.x update). But then there is a rump of 9.x sites still on 7.4 that have neither updated their PHP version nor their Drupal version and are drifting further behind.

Some percentage of those 9.5 sites on 7.4 will update their PHP version and Drupal version at the same time.

This only gives us an idea of package installs though - there will be 9.5 sites that haven't run composer update/install at all and those won't register in the stats.

There's an interesting thing (depending on your definition of interesting) happening on packagist with Drupal 9 php stats:
https://packagist.org/packages/drupal/core/php-stats#9

At the end of 2023, PHP 7.4 was 16% of installs with PHP 8.1 at 65% and PHP 8.0 at 10%

Now PHP 7.4 is 29% of installs, PHP 8.1 is 53% and PHP 8.2 is 7.5%, PHP 8.0 down to less than 5%.

So PHP 7.4 usage is a higher percentage, while PHP 8.0 has been almost squeezed out by 8.1 and 8.2.

Drupal 9 usage has gone down by approximately 30-40,000 in the same time period as sites update to Drupal 10.

So what this shows is that the sites that were already on PHP 8.0 or PHP 8.1 have either updated to Drupal 10 already, or in some cases updated to PHP 8.2 (likely in preparation for a 10.x update). But then there is a rump of 9.x sites still on 7.4 that have neither updated their PHP version nor their Drupal version and are drifting further behind.

Some percentage of those 9.5 sites on 7.4 will update their PHP version and Drupal version at the same time.

This only gives us an idea of package installs though - there will be 9.5 sites that haven't run composer update/install at all and those won't register in the stats.

Given that Drupal 10 is long since released with the 8.1 requirement and now in its long-term support phase, I'm going to mark this fixed. With changes to both our release cycle and PHP's allowing longer support for old versions (and therefore more time to upgrade), we're moving toward 🌱 [policy] Default to requiring the latest stable PHP release available when a new major version reaches beta Active as a standard practice so that we overlap PHP's support cycle as closely as possible rather than trying to predict how well HSPs will keep up.

Thanks to everyone who helped provide the data on their hosting providers so we could make a good decision for Drupal 10!

First alpha of PHP 8.5 is out and core using polifill already, so I'm using 📌 Discus adoption of #NoDiscard and PHP 8.5 Active for the same kind of tracking