This is a heads-up message about upcoming changes to MediaWiki-Vagrant.

With MediaWiki master now requiring PHP 7.4, MediaWiki-Vagrant is now completely unusable with MediaWiki. Currently, MediaWiki-Vagrant still uses Debian Stretch, for which custom PHP 7.2 packages were compiled. These are the same that were previously used in production. Stretch is now out of support completely, and no PHP 7.4 packages are available for it. Production already switched to Buster and has only compiled PHP 7.4 for that distro. As a result, switching to Debian Buster is the only remaining option. Because the buster-migration branch is out of date and equally broken, it will be abandoned and its patches cherry-picked onto master. A stretch-compat branch will be created but is basically useless unless you're trying to run older wmf release branches.

The phabricator task for the buster migration is https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T256822.

Mainframe98