http://php.net/eol.php says that PHP 5.5 and 5.4 are EOL, but a freshly installed Centos 7 box, then fully upgraded, gives me PHP 5.4.16-42.el7. What do people do about maintaining current versions of software on a variety of machines? We have some users who manage their own machines, and would rather not force them to jump through hoops of managing repos to get later versions.
I just hope I've missed something straightforward, and that someone here can offer advice.
That's not the point of an enterprise distro. The point is that once a distro version is released the versions of the software contained therein does not change. The OS predictably uses certain versions so that it is a known environment.
Yes, those versions are EOL, but RedHat spends vast amounts of money back porting security (and bug) fixes from later versions into the EOL versions so that they remain a viable option for the life of that particular version of the distro - that's what the '-42' on the version is all about.
If you *need* the most recent versions you have two options. Firstly you could use a more dynamic distro (F26 has PHP 7.1) - but you will need to upgrade every 12 months (preferably every 6 months). Second, you could use Software Collections - they have PHP 5.5, 5.6, 7.0 packaged in a way that's safe to use in RHEL/CentOS. There are also repositories that have other versions of PHP in them (such as Remi).
What you really, really must not do is to replace the default installed version of the various things in CentOS - that has the potential to break many things. (I heard of someone who replaced the default version of Python in CentOS with the latest greatest one - panic and confusion ensued.)
P.