On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 11:27 AM, Tyler Romeo <tylerromeo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
One thing I forgot to mention: while you're
considering Debian and Ubuntu
support, make sure to also take into account MediaWiki support.
Even if we upgrade our minimum PHP version now, older versions of
MediaWiki with the 5.3 requirement will still be supported and receive
security updates. So the only difference will be that people running Debian
oldstable will be locked into our older version and not be able to upgrade
to bleeding edge MediaWiki, which they probably won't do anyway considering
they haven't even upgraded their Debian. :P
Specifically, 1.23, which is the current LTS (long-term support) release,
is supported until May 2017 (so that covers Debian/Ubuntu and almost covers
RedHat, but that one provides PHP 5.5 anyway).
The next LTS is due spring 2016 and will be supported until spring 2019 and
I don't think we want to get stuck on PHP 5.3 with that one.