The Fedora development team has decided to postpone the version of the integrated PHP 8 package to Fedora 35. Click here for the relevant change proposals .
PHP 8 was officially released in November last year . This version introduced many new features and performance optimizations. Although PHP 8 has reserved sufficient time for Fedora 34, which is scheduled to be released this spring, Fedora developers have decided to integrate PHP 8 in Fedora 35, which will be released in the fall.
The reason why Fedora 34 insists on using PHP 7.4 is to allow more upstream projects to have time to convert their code base to a state compatible with PHP 8.0. Although PHP 8 evolved on the basis of PHP 7, there are still language changes, tightening of some language behaviors and other changes. These changes require many large projects to adjust for this ( see the PHP 8 migration guide for details) ). Therefore, Fedora 34 is cautious and insists on using another version of PHP 7.4 instead of using the latest version of the software package as usual.
PHP 8.1 is scheduled to be released at the end of this year. Because it is a minor version update, it is expected that Fedora 36 will be integrated on time.
If you want to use PHP 8.0 on Fedora or RHEL/CentOS, you might as well try the repository created by Remi Collet, the developer responsible for Fedora packaging: https://blog.remirepo.net/post/2020/11/30/Install-PHP -8.0-on-CentOS-RHEL-or-Fedora .