MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group/Blog/2015-12-04

Discussions on Minimum PHP Version for MediaWiki and the Future of Long Term Support (LTS) Releases

Author: Chris Koerner

People: Ori Livneh,

Tags: 1.27, Wikimedia Foundation, LTS, Release Management,

There are two interesting conversations around the future of PHP support in MediaWiki going on at the moment. Both will impact the upgrading of current wiki installs, and present interesting issues for those MediaWiki users who leverage the LTS release cycle for planning upgrades.

The first deals with raising MediaWiki's minimum PHP version to allow for newer features (and security) fixes. This will have an impact on MediaWiki users who are on shared hosting or otherwise can't easily control the version of PHP they are running. The proposed minimum version is 5.5.

As part of that conversation is also the topic of LTS releases of MediaWiki. The decision to identify the next LTS release (the last being version 1.23 released in 2015) as 1.27 overlaps with the question on what minimum version of PHP we want to bump things up to. PHP 5.5 is no longer in active support, but will continue to receive security updates for another seven months.

There's a log of the related RfC Meeting on Phabricator and you can learn more about MediaWiki's Version Lifecycle on MediaWiki.org.