On 8/14/14, Tyler Romeo tylerromeo@gmail.com wrote:
Hi everybody,
So we had a discussion about this a while ago, but just recently PHP let out the final 5.3 release. [0] Back in the previous thread concerning PHP 5.3, there seemed to be general agreement toward upping our PHP minimum requirements for the 1.24 release of MediaWiki.
Here are the stats:
- Soon Ubuntu (trusty) and Debian (jessie) releases will be running PHP 5.5
and 5.6, respectively.
- MediaWiki 1.23 ends support in May 2017
- PHP 5.4 is estimated to be supported until 2015
- Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (PHP 5.3) ends support on April 26, 2017
- Debian Squeeze (PHP 5.3) ends support in February 2016
- Debian Wheezy (PHP 5.4) *might* be supported until May 2018, depending on
the feedback received from the Squeeze LTS trial
These aren't the sort of stats I think we should base the decision on. Instead we should look at what most popular hosts support (Which will probably be correlated with what is written above). Although I don't know if those stats are easily available.
Additionally, looking at Special:Version on 'pedia:
PHP 5.3.10-1ubuntu3.10+wmf1 (apache2handler)
I know that's going to change very soon, but until it does, this conversation seems like a non-starter.
- Raise to PHP 5.5 for MW 1.24
- Raise to PHP 5.4 for MW 1.24, and then when a release with support past
2018 is made, go to 5.5.
imo, deciding what min version to require should be based on a combination of: use cases for features in the new version that we want to use, maintenance burden of supporting old versions, and the amount of inconvenience caused to re-users by the version requirement change. This seems more like requiring a new version of php simply because its new.
--bawolff