require php >=5.4.0

[craigh]

according to http://php.net/supported-versions.php

php 5.3.x was EOL sometime in 2014.

I know that semver and BC require OUR code to continue to work, but I'm wondering if it requires us to maintain BC with EOL vendor (php).

perhaps Core release 1.4.0 is the proper time to update our requirement to php >=5.4.0

ping @cmfcmf @Guite

FYI - according to that same page, php 5.4.x support will end 14 Sept 2015. Probably Core 2.0 will need to required php >=5.5

[craigh]

refs #2500

[craigh]

research:

http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php/5/all (June 2015)

http://blog.pascal-martin.fr/post/php-versions-stats-2014-10-en.html (Oct 2014)

PHP 5.3 has been out of maintenance for about three months now and it seems like it's time for the community to move on at last. Drupal8 will target 5.4. Symfony announced the results of a poll about which PHP version Symfony3 should target (TL;DR: 5.5 and 5.6 are preferred).

from: http://seld.be/notes/my-view-of-php-version-adoption (Nov 2014)

It would appear from these statistics that 5.3 is still the majority, which is disappointing. However, I don't think this needs to prevent us from moving forward.

http://symfony.com/blog/symfony-3-0-the-roadmap indicates that php 5.5 will be the requirement for Symfony 3.

Another concern is the version of php that is packaged with major OS distributions like Redhat, CentOs, etc. According to comments in the Symfony story, 5.4 ships with some but Redhat is not likely to change for multiple years.

[craigh]

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=redhat indicates the most recent version of php to ship standard in RHEL is 5.4.16 but that they are shipping and supporting much older versions.

http://www.redhat.com/developers/languages/php/ indicates RHEL 6 & 7 can support php version 5.4 and 5.5 but they require "manual" upgrade.

[robbrandt]

I can only relate my own experience, and that is that our production server with a variety of different kinds of sites is on 5.3.x, and one of the sites is still based on Zikula 1.2.x/pagesetter with little hope of upgrading any time soon.

[craigh]

I did a quick review of the servers that I use... 2 on 5.3 and one on 5.4 (the zikula.org server). so... maybe not 😝

[Guite]

Also piwik has stopped supporting PHP 5.3 as announced here: http://piwik.org/blog/2014/10/announcing-piwik-will-end-php-5-3-support-six-months-may-2015/

perhaps Core release 1.4.0 is the proper time to update our requirement to php >=5.4.0

Personally I would be fine with that.

For new projects PHP 5.3 should not be used anyway. And for existing projects users usually do not upgrade immediately to a new core version anyway except for security patches, because they use third party modules which aren't necessarily all ready for the new core yet.

Also with the BC layer 1.4 provides it is still a new generation, so raising requirements fits better to 1.4.0 than to 1.4.1. Version 2.0.0 is too far away and could then maybe require 5.5, but this another story.

[cmfcmf]

👍

[craigh]

ping @shefik @phaidon @Kaik @espaan @rallek @nmpetkov @robbrandt (and anyone else that reads this!)

please give your 👍 or 👎

[rallek]

1.4.0 is a new version. this should run in a safe environment. Therefor 5.4.0 is minimum I would use. So for me it is fine if we go that direction.

[espaan]

+1 as 5.3 is already eol. Zk 1.4 is a new modern version.

[robbrandt]

It's hard for me to decide either way. Our main server is Ubuntu 12.04, which is LTS until 2017 and we had planned on maintaining it as our main server until shortly before that, and then moving to whatever was at the beginning of it's LTS lifetime at that point, which is perhaps 2 years away (So, 16.04?). If our Zikula 1.2x/pagesetter site isn't EOL by then, we would likely leave it on the old server or spend a lot of time making it work on whatever php was supported on that version of Ubuntu. So, splitting our apps onto different servers may be on the horizon anyway. We are on Amazon, so managing multiple servers isn't a terrible burden and they can scale up and down flexibly. At this moment, we don't have immediate plans to move to 1.4.x because we would need to be certain the modules we use are functional on 1.4.x, and it isn't official yet. So, that itself might be a year away.

Here's the Ubuntu LTS chart: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS

I would like to point out that just because it supports php 5.3 doesn't mean it shouldn't work on >=5.4. I'm sure you all have considered that. I might have missed a discussion of the disadvantages of supporting 5.3. If there's little to lose in supporting 5.3, it should support 5.3 simply because there's so many servers still running it. Do we really want to create barriers for people to use Zikula?

[Kaik]

👍

[craigh]

@robbrandt - from my limited knowledge and googling, it appears that ubuntu doesn't ship standard with apache/php and they are installed manually. This would eliminate the LTS argument for that server.

The advantage of requiring 5.4 are new features of php. If we utilize those features (Traits for example) then 5.3 is no longer supported.

Do we really want to create barriers for people to use Zikula?

of course not, but do we also need to hold our project hostage to 2012 technology? still using your flip phone? 😜

[craigh]

PHP 5.4 features new since 5.3

[craigh]

apparently Drupal 8 will require 5.5+

[craigh]

this is interesting: Drupal's discussion and decision to require 5.4+ (from two+ years ago!)

[craigh]

Drupal's discussion and decision to go php 5.5+ on 18 June 2015

[craigh]

closed by #2510