[dev] Reasonable PHP version requirements

[Ralf Lang]

Hi Patrice,

Am 26.11.2019 um 21:10 schrieb Patrice Levesque:
>
>> While PHP 5.6 has a lot of useful things which we could not use back
>> when Horde 5 came out, it's a dead horde.  Active upstream support for
>> PHP 7.2 will end in 4 days (Dezember 2019), PHP 7.1 won't even receive
>> security updates by then unless you buy an enterprise distribution.
> Care must be taken with “active upstream support”; most GNU/Linux
> distributions support older PHP releases for years after upstream has
> lost interest:
>
>
> - Debian 9 has PHP 7.0, EOL TBD
> - (Latest Debian (10) was relased 2019/07 with PHP 7.3)

That's not upstream but it's more or less my point: Corporate users may
be stuck with older releases if they follow corporate practices like
using distribution rpm's and avoid building their own stuff.

There are ways around this like PPA/OBS/EPEL or using container setups.
The switch to PHP7 also means a considerable performance boost (even
without the free opcache extension)

>
>
> - RHEL 6 / CentOS 6 has PHP 5.3, EOL in 2020/11
> - RHEL 7 / CentOS 7 has PHP 5.4, EOL in 2024/06
These are the enterprise distributions mentioned above.
> - (Latest CentOS (8) was released 2019/09 with PHP 7.2)
>
>
> - SuSE 15.1 has PHP 7.2, EOL TBD and is the latest stable version

There is no SuSE 15.1

- There is OpenSUSE Leap  with php 7.2, (15.2 is in early alpha) 

- OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with php 7.3.11

- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) has abandoned PHP from the core
release. All recent SLES 15 SPx have a common "Web and Scripting Module"
which contains PHP, Python3 and other goodies.
This module is no longer bound to the long-living BC and ABI promises
and they can bump versions anytime they (SUSE) find it apropriate. They
also used to ship two different sets of PHP like "php53-*" and "php7-*"
in the past to support both backward compat and recent code.

However, commercial distribution support after a PHP version is EOLed is
driven either by security concerns or support requests by customers
having a specific issue.

>
>
> - Ubuntu 16.04 has PHP 7.0, EOL in 2021/04
> - Ubuntu 18.04 has PHP 7.2, EOL in 2023/04 and is the latest LTS version
>
>
> Using features available only in PHP > 7.2 pretty much means killing
> most stock GNU/Linux Horde installations.  Sure, there are ways to get a
> more recent PHP release outside of official distribution repositories,
> but counting on that is a risky proposition IMHO.
That's why I asked what would be a good baseline. I think the baseline
should be something >= 7.0

We should not forget horde is not isolated and depends on a ecosystem of
utilities like SabreDAV, Pear, PHPUnit (for development) and a few
others. Current master of SabreDAV requires PHP 7.0. Latest release
requires PHP 5.5.
As of today, the horde base app runs on php 5.3 and up.

Horde main versions tend to live long.

>
-- 
Ralf 
Linux Consultant / Developer
Tel.: +49-170-6381563
Mail: lang at b1-systems.de
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