Yeah, like, pretend you're looking at a message in a FreeBSD base system's documentation or something. They're just saying "don't write new shit that relies on

Yeah, like, pretend you're looking at a message in a FreeBSD base system's documentation or something. They're just saying "don't write new shit that relies on macOS system PHP, because it's going away"—it is... not recommended! As pointed out in the thread, it says the same thing for Python2 (though only if you run it bare for some reason, not with --version, and obviously only if you're invoking the system Python2, not something from e.g. Homebrew) so it seems to just be the message they use for anything that's deprecated and expected to vanish from macOS installations in the future. I bet the same message is used a bunch of other places. I'd be kind of horrified if anyone's writing PHP on a mac that is not targeting the system's PHP specifically, but is using it. You want whatever version's gonna be on your deployment target, not what happens to ship with your OS installation. Included scripting languages are there so you can write scripts targeting the OS, not develop with them generally. You could, but it's not what most people are going to want.