[arch-dev-public] Upcoming PHP 8.1 update

[Pierre Schmitz]

Hi David,

sorry about the hassle. I did not expect much issues here. I would
consider this one of the smoother PHP updates. Unless people ignored
warnings by previous PHP versions. I guess that is what mostly happend
here. PHP 8 gets more and more strict each version.

After reading the issues on Nextcloud's Github repository I guess we
can conclude that they will probably lack behind at least one PHP
minor version. This is quite incompatible with the Arch way.

Anyway, let's talk about some options to solve such issues:

1) Let's no longer package software that requires older versions of
PHP. Personally I would run such complex software with very specific
needs in a Docker container. E.g. Nextcloud even provides an official
one.
2) Keep trying to patch upstream packages to keep them working.
3) We provide two sets of PHP packages: "php" would always be the
latest stable version and be released no matter what. In addition to
this there would be e.g. "php-legacy" packages providing the oldest
supported version, currently 7.4. This would be updated to 8.0 in
November when 7 is EOL and php-8.2 get's released. The difference to
the currently available php7 package will be the lack of a version
number in package and binary names. So both packages will be a moving
target, but always two versions apart.

I would give option 3 a try. I'd like to get rid of versioned
constraints then and reduce the amount of third party modules. While
we would end up with more packages we need less testing and will be
able to move faster.

*) https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php

On Sat, Jan 22, 2022 at 10:57 AM David Runge <dave at sleepmap.de> wrote:
>
> On 2022-01-21 17:51:17 (+0100), Pierre Schmitz via arch-dev-public wrote:
> > I just released PHP 8.1 into [extra].
> >
> > Please also check https://archlinux.org/todo/php-7-retiredment/ so PHP
> > 7 can be dropped soon.
> >
> > have a nice weekend,
>
> Unfortunately, it likely won't be ;_;
>
> https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/73452
>
> Another reminder for users to *please* join the Testing Team [1] and
> help test our packages!
>
> Best,
> David
>
> [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Testing_Team
>
> --
> https://sleepmap.de



-- 
Pierre Schmitz, https://pierre-schmitz.com