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Drop Support for PHP 5.3 and 5.4

1 Requirements

ILIAS has a tradition to support old versions of PHP for a very long time, such that usually even the newest version of ILIAS will run on old Linux distribution with long-term-support and their respective versions of php: http://www.ilias.de/docu/goto_docu_lm_367.html.

E.g. Ubuntu releases LTS-versions every second year with support for 5 years https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS

• Ubuntu 12.04 will be supported until October 2017 (PHP 5.3)
• Ubuntu 14.04 will be supported until October 2019 (PHP 5.5)

Any ILIAS version that supports even the oldes LTS Linux distributions can only use php-functionality which is *at least* 5 years old (e.g. in the case of Ubuntu).

This has the advantage that new verions of ILIAS can be used with old LTS distributions. But it also has the disadvantage, that the whole ILIAS community has to wait for a long time to benefit from new php-functionality.

This request is to drop support for any php-version prior to 7.0 with ILIAS 5.2 (even php-5.6). Of course this will only work, if php7-support can be established in time - othewise this request can be postponed to the first ILIAS release with full support for php7.

The reasoning is that php7 offers a rich set of new functionality. This is worth the discussion about what needs to be done to make these new benefits available to the ILAS community as soon as possible.

Of course this would have some implications:

• First, administrators with old Linux distributions will not be able to upgrade to ILIAS 5.2 or any following version before they upgrade the operating system. I suggest to extend the support of ILIAS 5.1 _as long as it takes_ (with regard to popular LTS-distributions) to make this request possible.
• We can not simply repeat this approach with every version of ILIAS - for otherwise we would end up with really long support cycles for _every_ ILIAS version. But it could be repeated like "once in a while" e.g. every nth ILIAS release, or whenever the incentive of new php-functionality seems to justify the effort of extending the support cycle of the previous ILIAS release.

Especially administrators running LTS-Linux will be affected from not being able to upgrade to ILIAS 5.2. On the other hand, running LTS Linux might indicate a preference for stability over new features. I would argue that those administrators which "don't want to upgrade" their Linux distribution once in a while, should be happy with some good-old stable ILIAS with long-term support - as long as they can continue to use ILIAS. Of course this reasoning will not be true for every administrator. But anyway this is about a trade-off: Some people who want the benefits of new technology as soon as possible vs. some people who want to cherry-pick new features of ILIAS (as soon as possible), while sticking to old Linux versions (as long as possible). We just can't have everything and need to make a choice.

Note:

• ILIAS seems to have a tradition to support only about 2-3 major versions at any time. I.e the last versions of ILIAS had support for roughly 2,5 years: http://www.ilias.de/docu/goto_docu_pg_6543_35.html
• PHP versions usually have support for 3 years: http://php.net/supported-versions.php

2 Additional Information

• Idea / concept: (please add your name when creating this feature request)
• Interest in funding: (please indicate if you are interested/able to fund this feature)
• Maintainer: (will be set by Jour Fixe / maintainer)
• Implementation of the feature is done by (will be set by Jour Fixe / maintainer)
• Testcases by: (please add your name if you want to create the testcases for this feature)

3 Discussion

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], Feb 01, 2016: We discussed the request and decided:

• We drop the support of PHP 5.3 and 5.4 with ILIAS 5.2 (end of 2016) and allow to use new functions introduced with PHP 5.4 and 5.5.
• We keep the support of PHP 5.5 and 5.6 at least with ILIAS 5.2 - but will test this version with PHP 7 (hopefully).
• We are not able to offer a longtime support version for ILIAS and want to keep the current release cycle of two versions plus extra time.

4 Implementation

not relevant

Test Cases

not relevant

Approval

not relevant