This would be awesome. It's currently very difficult to protect a domain model 
without this feature.

As in Java, the package access level should be implemented both for entire classes and for individual members in a class.

Any news regarding this feature?

I was about to post this exact request.
 

 This is currently handled by annotations and flagging the method as @api or @internal (see http://phpdoc.org/docs/latest/references/phpdoc/tags/api.html and http://phpdoc.org/docs/latest/references/phpdoc/tags/internal.html ) which are used to denote whether third parties should call the methods or not.

The reason for this is simple: It allows package authors to break BC on the methods (or remove them entirely) safe in the knowledge that it won't break third party code because the only place their being called from is the same project.

In Java this is handled by the 'protected' keyword which allows any method in the same package to call a method flagged as 'protected'. 

I'd also like to see a 'package' (or 'namespace', or another word) visibility that mimics this functionality. To make it sensible and actually useful it should be anything in the same root namespace. Example code:


x.php

<?php
namespace Foo\Bar;
class X {
  package function y() {
  }
}
?>


y.php
<?php
namespace Foo\Whatever;
class Y {
   public function __construct() {
        $x = new \Foo\Bar\X;
        $x->y(); //ALLOWED
   }

}
?>


z.php
<?php
namespace Another\Project\Entirely;
class Y {
   public function __construct() {
        $x = new \Foo\Bar\X;
        $x->y(); //NOT ALLOWED
   }

}
?>

Duplicate of request #52297