Feature Request: PHP 8.5 Support (Remove <8.5.0 constraint)

[mbnl]

Hi team,

First of all, thank you for maintaining such a great and essential package!

Description
I am currently setting up my environment with PHP 8.5 (specifically PHP 8.5.5). When trying to install or update dependencies via Composer, I am encountering a dependency resolution error because phpoffice/phpspreadsheet currently restricts the PHP version to <8.5.0.

Error Output

phpoffice/phpspreadsheet 1.30.4 requires php >=7.4.0 <8.5.0 -> your php version (8.5.5) does not satisfy that requirement.

[oleibman]

PhpSpreadsheet does support Php 8.5. It does not, and will not, support it on the 1.30.x and 2.1.x branches. If you are using the 1.30.x branch (PhpSpreadsheet version 1), and are doing so because of Laravel, please see SpartnerNL/Laravel-Excel#4345. In particular,see comment SpartnerNL/Laravel-Excel#4345 (comment) for how to work around the problem until that release becomes official. If you are stuck on PhpSpreadsheet 1 for any other reason, you should upgrade.

[miken32]

Of note is that this package was working with PHP 8.5 until a recent change to composer.json blocked updates. It's really bad practice for a minor release to break platform compatibility. (I'm not asking for that change be reverted, to be clear. It's just not a great experience for me, as a user who wasn't aware there were more modern branches.)

[oleibman]

My apologies for the inconvenience. Php 8.5 was a major disruption for us. In particular, the change to deprecate the increment operator for strings hit us very hard; it is an operation which we used throughout out code base when dealing with spreadsheet columns. That change also arrived very late in the release cycle - it only "worked" with Php8.5 before that change arrived. You can easily verify that any of the Version 1 releases which supposedly worked with 8.5 no longer do so. Because of differences (e.g. support for Php7.4) between this and one other release from the current base, it was just too much work to add the necessary support.

All the "live" branches except for "master" operate on the same basis as this one - any release is a "patch" release, not minor, not major. There is no other place for them. The alternative is to just drop support for those releases altogether, a prospect which I often find tempting but have managed to resist. Perhaps it could have been handled better in past, but it is all water under the bridge now.

Again, my apologies.

[oleibman]

Laravel Excel release 4, which supports the latest versions of Php and PhpSpreadsheet, is now released.