On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 1:14 PM, Bryan Davis bd808@wikimedia.org wrote:
Ubuntu Server LTS versions have 5 years of support, so 12.04 will not be EOL until April of 2017. PHP 5.3 will be EOL in July of 2014. I'm sure that 3 year difference will be a major pain point for the Ubuntu security team.
OK, so Ubuntu Server LTS will EOL in April 2017. Additionally, MediaWiki 1.23 LTS (our next release) is planned to EOL in May 2017. With that in mind, I think it's fair to say that once 1.23 is released we will have the opportunity to increase our PHP requirement.
I strongly recommend we do so. A list of nice things about 5.4 that we'd definitely use:
- Array literals - $this support in closures - Class member access based on expression - Class member access after instantiation - Function return value array dereferencing - The JsonSerializable interface - Improved parse_url() behavior
Of course there is traits as well, but that's more of an actual new feature, and it will be a while before MediaWiki starts using traits everywhere.
*-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science