[kijin]

Ubuntu and CentOS are maintaining versions that upstream has already EOL'd, so there's no upstream to push patches to. Most other distros (hello, Fedora) have much shorter support cycles so they don't really need those patches, either. There might be some sharing between Ubuntu and Debian LTS.

The majority of patches still come from upstream. If a new vulnerability is found in PHP 7.1 or 7.2, chances are the same bug exists in 7.0. So the maintainers check if their versions are also vulnerable, and if so, backport the fixes. As time goes on and differences accumulate, patches from upstream will become less relevant. It looks like Red Hat largely gave up on maintaining PHP 5.3 in RHEL/CentOS 6 after about 7 years. We'll have to see how long they actually stand behind PHP in CentOS 7 and 8.