In a new post to his site Colin O'Dell has shared a Composer "metapackage" that can help you avoid unsupported Symfony component versions with the help of Composer's own internal version checking system.

Using symfony/symfony makes Composer install all Symfony Components in the same version. But when using the standalone packages, Composer might install dependencies in a different major version - for example, symfony/validator v2.8 is compatible with symfony/translation v3.0.

This is fine if you don't want to stick strictly to Symfony LTS versions, but it does mean that you could end up using versions of components which no longer receive security updates.

Rather than having to specifically define (and manage) the versions of package you want to install, you could opt to install his package that will do the hard work for you. It uses the "conflict" handling in the Composer configuration to limit version numbers on many of the popular Symfony packages and requires them to be greater than or equal to certain versions.

Fabien Potencier of the Symfony project has a post on his site that introduces Symfony Packs, groupings of useful packages that can enhance the functionality of your application without having to manually load each package individually.

We get a lot of positive feedback on Symfony 4. You love the new directory structure. You love the simplicity of using services without configuring anything. And you love the automation that Flex provides. It makes me happy and proud.

[...] But one issue I hear sometimes is that it is more complex to start a new project. [...] You loved the simplicity of starting a project with the Symfony Standard Edition. Is it nostalgia? Perhaps. Would it be possible to get the best of both world? Certainly!

The Packs are "metapackages" that Composer uses to bundle dependencies together that relate either in functionality or as defined by a custom configuration. The article gives an example using the symfony/orm-pack pack and talks about how you can use it as-is or you can "unpack" it into its separate packages and automatically update the composer.json with the result.