Hey all,

I'd like to highlight that, as of yesterday, MediaWiki code (and much more) no
longer supports PHP 7.4 in its development branch.

MediaWiki already stopped officially supporting PHP 7.4 back in the MediaWiki
1.42 release a year ago[0] following the support policy for PHP[1], but as
Wikimedia production was still running on 7.4, the development branches for
most things continued to be tested with 7.4. As of this week, Wikimedia SRE
completed the removal of the last traced use of PHP 7.4[2], and so we were
able to decommission CI support[3] and land the official support change[4]
from April 2024[5].

In practice, this should have no effect on anyone running a current or recent
MediaWiki installation. People still running old versions of MediaWiki on PHP
7.4 or PHP 8.0 will have to upgrade their (out-of-support[6]) PHP version
when they next upgrade MediaWiki, which we encourage. The only supported
version of MediaWiki that can be run on PHP before 8.1.0 is MediaWiki 1.39,
which goes end-of-life in six months' time, November 2025.

Developers will have to support fewer quirks and issues, and we can unwind some
unnecessary scaffolding, oddities where features had to be adjusted in release
branches. Most importantly, we will be unblocked in several areas where
upstream libraries and tools had long-ago stopped supporting PHP 7.4.

As part of this, Wikimedia CI for MediaWiki itself, as well as all extensions,
skins, libraries, and tools has been adjusted to test PHP 8.1–8.3 (or as
appropriate). Wikimedia CI no longer has the facility to test in PHP 7.4. Work
to support PHP 8.4 continues, and for those interested, there is a Phabricator
board to track known issues[7].

This has been a long time coming, and I want to thank the very large number of
people at Wikimedia across the MediaWiki group, SRE, and product teams, as well
as many volunteers & others in the developer community, for their perseverance
to get us to this point.

[0] - <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Compatibility>
[1] - <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Support_policy_for_PHP>
[2] - <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T319432>
[3] - <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/integration/config/+/1127083>
[4] - <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/1128015>
[5] - <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/1017958>
[6] - <https://www.php.net/supported-versions>
[7] - <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/6953/>

Yours
--
James D. Forrester (he/him or they/themself)
Wikimedia Foundation
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