On Fri, 24 Jan 2020 at 08:53, Peter Presland <peterp(a)wikispooks.org> wrote:
Per other replies about php version requirements and
the putative
difficulties involved for Redhat OS users, I am left wondering about how
important the stated Mediawiki php version requirements really are.
My wondering is prompted by the fact that both Wikipedia and the few
other MW foundation sites I have checked, are all running MW1.35.0
while still on php 7.2.26. Whereas the stated php minimum version
requirement for the current latest stable MW1.34 is php 7.2.9.
Probably a simple explanation but as a Centos 7 OS user, I am confused.
Per the support policy for PHP
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Support_policy_for_PHP>, recently codified,
in picking our support framework for major PHP versions we try to carefully
balance the needs of new sysadmins, where we should encourage people to
make secure choices, with upgrading sysadmins, who will want the simplest
upgrade path possible.
In practical terms, we only increase the minor PHP version when we find
particular upstream bugs in PHP that are not sensible to work around, or
where our upstream dependencies insist on it. That's why we require 7.2.9
instead of 7.2.0 – we had to pick for 1.34 when dropping PHP 7.1 and 7.0
(see T234766 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T234766> and the
corresponding patch
<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/542220>).
For Wikimedia production, we run the latest version in Debian stable (with
any necessary local patches), to take advantage of upstream performance
improvements, bug fixes and so on, and to ensure we can respond to
incidents as appropriate. Right now that's 7.2.26, up from 7.2.24 over the
last few months. It's always a better idea to run the latest version of PHP
recommended by your OS.
MediaWiki will explicitly refuse to run on versions of PHP we don't
support, with a specific error message (as will composer when you try to
install dependencies), to avoid any mysterious run-time errors and
corruptions.
Yours,
--
*James D. Forrester* (he/him <http://pronoun.is/he> or they/themself
<http://pronoun.is/they/.../themself>)
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>