I noticed that lots of extensions were recently updated to use mediawiki-codesniffer 0.7.1 [1].

This has some implications I think are worth being aware of:

1) Many open patches will need manual rebasing and conflict resolution. 2) Those extensions will now depend on at least PHP 5.4 due to short array syntax [2] instead of PHP 5.3.

Both can cause inconveniences, (1) mainly for developers and (2) mostly for users.

Some patches doing this update in a more thorough and tested way [3] existed but were ignored. It would be nice to avoid that in the future.

Please also watch out for code that might have got removed unexpectedly due to a bug [4]. On quick inspection I did not see this happening in those patches.

[1] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/status:merged+topic:bump-dev-deps,n,z [2] https://secure.php.net/manual/en/migration54.new-features.php [3] For example https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/287315/ [4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T134857

-Niklas