Comment 6 for bug 1579815

@Phil,

That's a lot of "shoulds" for a feature request :)

14.04 was created in 2014. As far as I can tell, php-mongodb did not exist then. As you pointed out, php-mongo was renamed to php-mongodb. Except that https://docs.mongodb.com/ecosystem/drivers/php/ does not clearly indicate it's a rename, but an evolution of the PECL package. If it was strictly a rename, wouldn't the older driver have stopped seeing development at some point (I see a release in April of this year on the PECL page).

I never said the PECL driver only works with PHP7, I said "the way the packaging works (rather intentionally afaict), it is explicitly only designed to work with PHP7+.". I believe we only have the appropriate build dependencies available in 16.04 and on.

Additionally, I did mean to say earlier that the dependencies missing in 14.04 were build dependencies (libbson, libmongoc). Those are now embedded in the library, it seems, so they are less of a concern, however in a quick test, neither the 16.04 or 16.10 versions of php-mongodb build in 14.04, due to missing dependencies. This implies there is more work than a simple backport, to me.

Finally, afaict, "Laravel PHP framework" is not an Ubuntu package. There are many older package versions (or newer packages not packaged at all) in Trusty. I think that's expected, given that it's been 2 years since release.