I hate that I can never make these RFC meetings. Yesterday's meeting seems to have had no one to point out that "if we drop php 5.6, we also drop hhvm" is not necessarily true, even though I pointed that out on T172165 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T172165#3658886 well before the meeting. HHVM even in PHP5 mode (supposedly[1]) supports all the new PHP7 features that don't break PHP5 behavior. There are 7 php7 things it specifically doesn't support (listed in T173786#3651007 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T173786#3651007).
So supporting the intersection of 7.0 and HHVM 3.18-in-php5-mode in 1.31 may not be as impossible as it was assumed to be.
For that matter, HHVM 3.18's php7 mode was tested and it was found that the hhvm.php7.scalar_types bit was buggy (until 3.20), but no tests were made for the other six parts of the php7 mode.
[1]: "Supposedly" because there may well be incompatibilities/bugs in HHVM's implementation.
On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 11:54 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Today's RFC discussion was T172165, a proposal for MediaWiki 1.31 to require PHP 7.0. There was no consensus on that proposal, due to the opinion from Ops that it is not feasible to migrate all application servers to Debian Stretch and PHP 7.0 by the expected release date of June 2018.
However, there was consensus on the lesser goal of requiring PHP 5.6. So, we have created a new RFC for PHP 5.6 (T178538) and are hereby placing it into Last Call.
The proposal is: MediaWiki should bump its PHP requirement to 5.6 as soon as possible, and at the latest in time for the 1.31 branch point (i.e. April 2018).
"As soon as possible" means as soon as the few remaining uses of PHP 5.5 in the WMF cluster have been migrated to PHP 5.6 or later, or to HHVM. We'd like to see this migration work be given a high priority.
If you have any objection to this proposal, please raise it on Phabricator before the end of the Last Call period, which will be October 31.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178538
-- Tim Starling
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