Topic on Talk:MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle

The new addition states:

We may drop support for EOL versions of PHP, but will have at least one compatible version for each MediaWiki version we support.

Could this be modified so that support can be dropped only for PHP versions not supported by the current stable MediaWiki version (but supported by the previous one)? In the current wording, it may pose stricter requirements on users than usual extensions, which have release branches, while in my understanding, the compatibility policy is about posing less strict requirements on users. It would even allow entirely dropping PHP 7 support in the 2023.07 release (by that time MediaWiki 1.40 should be released), even though for example Debian 12 may not have been released at that point, meaning that no supported Debian release would contain a PHP version supported by MLEB (Debian 11 contains only 7.4).

Thanks for your thoughts. MLEB is indeed additional service on top of what MediaWiki generally provides. We need to consider the effort of providing this service compared to the value it provides to us and its users.

The costs are mainly additional testing (unavoidable), extra effort for making most changes backwards compatible (we have made exceptions for new features) and benefits not reaped from using newer PHP language or MediaWiki core features.

Additionally, these costs affect other developers too, those who want to make changes to these extensions, not just the Language team.

In this case, the motivation for dropping support for PHP 7.3 was that MediaWiki was essentially claiming to support 7.4 only, but kept support for 7.3 because WMF still used it. Additionally, PHP 7.4 is widely available, so the impact for dropping support for 7.3 should be low. PHP 7.4 brings a bunch of improvements and new features that made it compelling to drop support for 7.3.

The wording is rather lax, to give us flexibility on making these trade-offs case-by-case. I am not expecting us to completely drop PHP 7 support very soon.