On the Laravel News site they've posted a tutorial by Joe Ferguson showing you how to [use older versions of Homestead](https://laravel-news.com/using-older-versions-of-homestead, the box not the app, in your development environment if there's a need.

There are two parts to Homestead: the Vagrant box and the Homestead source code (Homestead app). The Homestead Vagrant box is a snapshot of a preconfigured virtual machine ready to use. [...] We use the Laravel Settler repo to build the Homestead boxes. You have to ensure the version of the Homestead Vagrant box is compatible with the version of the Homestead app you are using.

Why would you want to use a previous version? [...] While Homestead development moves forward pretty quickly, you may not be ready to move your clients from PHP 5.5. While you should have already moved your apps to PHP 7.0 for the performance gains, I understand that because Laravel 5.1 supports 5.5, developers may want to continue using that version.

He then walks you through an example, showing how to use PHP 5.5 with Homestead and what version to put for the best support. It requires a little bit of manual fiddling around but not too much. Then it's just a simple "vagrant up" to get it running. He also includes instructions on using PHP 7.0, checking out a different version of the Homestead repository and bringing up the box similar to above.

Johannes Schlüter has a new post for those wondering what's going to happen to PHP 5.3 and 5.4 now that PHP 5.5 has been released.

Yay, finally we released PHP 5.5, which is a new big release for PHP. In preparation for this I yesterday sent out a mail to the PHP core developers stating that the "PHP-5.3 BRANCH IS CLOSED NOW" [...] What this means for users of PHP is that they can continue using PHP 5.3 and when upgrades come they are very low risk of breaking anything (we always try not to break anything, but any person's bug might be another person's feature) so they should be applicable easily and applied fast.

So, PHP 5.3 users can upgrade in the 5.3.x series without having to worry too much about breakage. PHP 5.4 users should be able to easily upgrade to 5.5 without many issues too: "PHP 5.5 also mostly uses the same code as 5.4 with a few extra features."

PHPClasses.org has released their latest episode of their "Lately in PHP" podcast series. This episode (#31) talks some about some of the changes happening in versions in PHP in the upcoming months.

As PHP 5.5 is getting ready to be released in the next months, the end of line for PHP 5.3 is being planned, while the original MySQL extension is being deprecated in PHP 5.5 to be killed in a later version.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or you can watch the video of the recorded Google Hangout of the taping.

Greg Beaver has a warning for those developers using an older version of PEAR (1.4.4 and older) and uninstalling packages - a bug that might cause issues from an unauthorized uninstallation.

Recently, a curious bug was opened at pear.php.net for the PEAR package (#9639). In it, a user was able to uninstall the Structures_DataGrid package, even though all of its subpackages were installed, which should have prevented uninstallation.

There's been a key update to the dependency module that keeps this sort of thing from happening, but it's only in versions 1.4.5 and higher. Greg also recommends the reinstall of any packages that you've installed before and up to version 1.4.4 just to ensure that the dependency database is up to date.

Greg Beaver has a warning for those developers using an older version of PEAR (1.4.4 and older) and uninstalling packages - a bug that might cause issues from an unauthorized uninstallation.

Recently, a curious bug was opened at pear.php.net for the PEAR package (#9639). In it, a user was able to uninstall the Structures_DataGrid package, even though all of its subpackages were installed, which should have prevented uninstallation.

There's been a key update to the dependency module that keeps this sort of thing from happening, but it's only in versions 1.4.5 and higher. Greg also recommends the reinstall of any packages that you've installed before and up to version 1.4.4 just to ensure that the dependency database is up to date.