Hi!

Thanks to some awesome work by Erik Bernhardson, phan[1], a new static analysis tool, is now voting[2] on MediaWiki core patches.

It's significantly more advanced than any of our other current tools, and should help identify some types of errors. It uses PHP 7's AST to process code, but is capable of analyzing PHP5 code.

There's documentation on mediawiki.org[3] about how it is currently configured, and how to set it up locally. You'll need PHP 7 with the ast extension to actually run phan. If that's not possible for your system, you can rely on jenkins to run it for you.

[1] https://github.com/etsy/phan [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T132636 [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Continuous_integration/Phan

-- Legoktm