new release needed for newer versions of PHP

[jamincollins]

The existing stable release of dokuwiki breaks under recent PHP releases, there are a few existing bug reports about this:

• lesserphp/lessc.inc.php uses curly brace array/string access syntax which is not supported anymore in PHP8 #3399
• PHP Warning: Undefined array key "speech" in lib/exe/css.php on line 83 #3470

This impacts bleeding edge distributions, like Arch Linux. I've also reported this to the Arch Linux bug tracker:

• https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/73658

[Klap-in]

We are stabilizing the current development version.
https://github.com/splitbrain/dokuwiki/projects/6
Of course a lot of volunteer work is involved, so due date is not available.
All testing feedback is welcome.

[jamincollins]

Why not a bug fix/update of the previous stable with only the two above patches?

[Klap-in]

I think there are more PHP 8 improvements? Or are these the only one that hit php8 users?

[michitux]

Are you sure this is an issue with the Arch Linux package? The Arch Linux DokuWiki package depends on the php7 package and therefore compatibility issues with PHP 8 should be irrelevant for it.

[jamincollins]

It may depend on php7, but Arch Linux php and php-fpm are now 8.1.2-1 and I ran into this issue on my personal installation.

$ pacman -Q | grep -P 'php|dokuwiki'
dokuwiki 20200729-3
php 8.1.2-1
php-fpm 8.1.2-1
php-gd 8.1.2-1
php7 7.4.27-1

In my case, I need php-fpm for the setup through nginx. I suspect others will hit the same issue I did. I guess they might be able to work around the issue by using php7-fpm, but I'm also pretty sure that isn't were they'll wind up given the error messages. They'll likely find the above two patches (like I did) and get it working under php-fpm.

are these the only one that hit php8 users?

From my experience the above patches are the only ones I needed.

[ryannathans]

PHP 7 is EOL - security updates end November 2022

[manikbh]

Just to upvote this issue: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (current), has PHP8.1 by default.
So right now I cannot port my old wiki to the new server (except using bad solutions, e.g. using development version or using an out-of-distribution older PHP package).
A new stable version would be nice.

[Slarky]

I had the same issues on CentOS 9 Stream, where the default PHP version is 8.0 (so I'm pretty sure it'll also affect RHEL9 users). The error.log was spammed with

2022/06/11 18:19:33 [error] 32976#32976: *185 FastCGI sent in stderr: "PHP message: PHP Fatal error: Array and string offset access syntax with curly braces is no longer supported in .../dokuwiki/vendor/marcusschwarz/lesserphp/lessc.inc.php on line 761" while reading response header from upstream, client: [...]

and also the DokuWiki pages looked weird (Search button text was off, rendering quoted text didn't work, 500er errors). It wasn't a pleasant experience.

FreeBSD also stopped building DokuWiki due to this, see https://www.freshports.org/www/dokuwiki/

You have to change just 4 lines to make it work with PHP8, why isn't there a new minor release yet?

[jgod]

Can't pkg install dokuwiki - finds nothing, on 13.1-RELEASE

[Klap-in]

There is now a release candidate. No idea if the channels above mentioned consider release candidates? In that case it might be useful to notify them. We do not yet know when the stable release will be. Unfortunately, we as developers do not put effort in packaging for distributions due to limited resources.

[jamincollins]

I believe a new release is out now, and seems to resolve the issue. At least Arch is shipping: 20230404