Dear Maintainer,

The top-level versioned php metapackage (php7.4 at the time of writing) has the following Depends field:

Depends: libapache2-mod-php7.4 | php7.4-fpm | php7.4-cgi, php7.4-common

Thus, a user who runs 'apt install php' will get libapache2-mod-php7.4, along with apache2 itself.

Apache upstream considers prefork to be specific to "sites requiring stability or compatibility with older software"[1]. And in the modern era, best practices for hosting websites with dynamic content include using either a threaded MPM in apache, or a different httpd such as nginx.

Because of this, it seems that libapache2-mod-php is no longer a sane default when installing php. It makes sense to keep it available, both for the legacy reasons cited above and for environments like a low traffic application that requires apache features, but it should not be the first choice of sapi to install.

Please consider making this change.

Thanks,

Jesse (sney)

[1] https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/en/mpm.html