Talk:Support policy for PHP/Flow

While it's useful having the verbage, having things in other formats (graphs, tables etc) that doesn't require a lot of cross checking would be very helpful.

Related to phab:T316080, I created Support policy for PHP/Tables. I'm not claiming it's good, or pretty, but it hopefully gives the answers (and the data?) to the first part of the "Criteria" - "New major releases of MediaWiki must support at least one PHP version for each of the following criteria".

Not sure offhand how to integrate/include it into the page, but I would like to. And then keep it up to date for supported releases of MW.

I'm not sure it's more readable as-is. Maybe I can fiddle to try to make it less complicated?

Yeah, all the text didn't need to be in the table, it looks better now. Thanks!

It was just the simplest way as I was trying to structure and gather it.

Never really meant to be "more readable", but rather being the "output" of the rules with hard numbers, rather than the vague relative-ness of the rules to an arbitrary (but unlinked) dataset.

I suspect the "Highest/Lowest (upstream)" columns can be merged for initial and EOL. It's fairly obvious from "7.2, 7.3 and 7.4" which is "highest" and "lowest"? But keeping them seperate for initial and EOL, because different points in time, makes sense?

Just maybe need to include some versions in between... Let's see how that looks

https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Support_policy_for_PHP/Tables&oldid=5709542 looks simpler too now

So we now have this table, but we don't use it anywhere. Should we?

At any given point in time, there must be at least one combination of Debian Linux LTS and MediaWiki that both parties support for an overlapping period of two years.

This is not possible. The MediaWiki LTS cycle is three years, so 1.5 years into the cycle, there is no MediaWiki version at all which will be supported for two years (the old LTS is supported for 1.5 more years, the next LTS is not released yet, and the non-LTS versions are only supported for one year).

I think what's really meant here is not any point in time but the time of the new MediaWiki release?

Or maybe overlapping period of two years means a period of time that contains the point in time we are talking about, but does not necessarily start with it?

The intention here is that at all times there is one or more such combinations with a time span of support that is at least "two years wide" (such as visualised on Version lifecycle), and that there will be a point in that span where you can jump to newer one with 2+ years before the next required jump.

It is indeed not neccecarily true that there is always a starting point for such smooth chain with 2+ years left.

Bottom line being to always have continuous support, and not require upgrades more than once every two years. However, depending on when you start it indeed does not mean the that first upgrade has to be more than 2 years away, it is allowed to be sooner.

Thanks. I was trying to work out T257879 but I guess it's not possible then.

Nevermind. This confused me for a while but I think I figured it out.

Some handy links:

• PHP version lifecycle
• Debian lifecycle, LTS lifecycle
• Debian PHP support
• Ubuntu lifecycle
• Ubuntu PHP support
• MediaWiki version lifecycle
• MediaWiki PHP compatibility

As Niklas pointed out, removing support for a PHP version from core can be disruptive for sites running on master. I think we agreed during the meeting that such a changed should be announced on wikitech-l a couple of weeks in advance. Can we put that after "Outside the above criteria, maintainers of MediaWiki core (as defined by the Privilege policy) are free to drop support for other versions of PHP without needing to involve TechCom or its RFC process."?

Oops, forgot about that. Yes, absolutely. Done now :)