Islandora PHP Version support discussion

Introduction

This group is to help flesh out the discussion around PHP support

Attendees

• Danny Lamb
• Diego Pino
• Cary Gordon
• Bryan Brown
• Jared Whiklo ⭐️
• Jonathan Green
• Paul Cummins
• Jordan Dukart
• Will Panting

Agenda

1. https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/system-requirements/php

Minutes

The result of this group is to be formalized and enshrined to ensure a standard application. This will be passed along to Roadmap group and also report back to the Committers Call.

Split between what we are supporting and what we are testing. One of the issues we are testing many very similar PHP versions and quite a few tests then only distributing one vagrant machine in the end.

Cary: Is there any reason to support a lot of back versions? We host on one VM which shares one version of PHP. What is the justification for supporting such old versions of PHP?

Paul: U of Tennesee and don't have the money to compile and set up so use what is in the OS. We are not a small institution and there are smaller ones. We have a site license for Redhat, and run everything on it. We can pull in other repos, but other smaller institutions are far more limited in what they can do. Raising the version of PHP in 14.04, which would be a custom repo.

Jared: We run RedHat and use the Software Collection Libraries (SCL). Perhaps giving people some instructions around how to upgrade their PHP within their existing stack. Then we can say we have tried.

Jon: Jared as a RedHat site, don't you need to pull from other repos to run.

Jared: I did pull from an external repository to install a newer version of PHP (5.6), but I think it could come from the SCL.

Danny: What is the problem of pulling from an external repository. This seems to be a serious issue to admins, but what is the problem.

Cary: This is normally a single box, not running a bunch of services. It seems we have a small, microscopic organization. Perhaps we should consider just testing against the last two versions like they do with browsers.

Jon: We do want to support smaller institutions, but also need to consider that this is a small development organization.

Jared: I think admins are concerned about how they support the central OS software when their might be other libraries added in.

Paul: The call before this asked about people that were interested in helping, I would be interested in helping a RedHat institution upgrade their PHP. Also, to close the gap between what we support and what we test to make it clear. Even if it is a statement that vagrant is not in sync with the current release with regards to PHP/Ubuntu versions.

Danny: We need to lay out what is support for the LTSs that are supported by Ubuntu and Redhat and compare to the table of what PHP supports and find what we can support.

Jordan: Why are we dropping support for in-between versions for testing.

Jon: Having a faster testing framework means that it is easier to tell when tests fail, rather then having to wait several hours to ensure it passes.

Diego: It is more about collecting a group of PHP versions to ensure that we are covering the major differences. Sometimes we have to ask for several revisions to cover coding standards and this results in several hours of testing and this can cause other things to get stuck in queues.

Jared: If we can support those smaller institutions in other ways (ie. one-on-one, distro specific upgrade documentation) would that help move them to a closer version or at least off those older versions. I mean really we are saying we won't test those old versions anymore but that doesn't necessarily mean they won't work.

Will: Once we remove a test we can no longer say we support that version.

Jon: I don't know if that is true, if you cover the oldest and a newer then you can skip in the middle.

Will: But we are talking about dropping support for old versions.

Jordan: We are going to be stuck to Drupal's version which is 5.3.2 for Drupal 7 and PHP 7 is semi-supported. We are going to be stuck with it for a time.

Will: Some institutions are stuck with the version of PHP they have.

Cary: I don't understand why that it is too high of a bar to upgrade. Installing Islandora already causes you to reach.

Jared: What if we stop supporting newer versions of PHP instead.

Cary: PHP is making great strides in recent versions and I don't understand why that is a small price to pay to gain the benefits.

Paul: One thing that would come out of limiting versions, is where institutions are going to conferences to learn about software. So having a newer requirement can be a blocker.

Danny: Inside the context of a large install base.

Jordan: I think there is a lot of performance improvements, and we are hoping the support of Drupal 7 becomes better and we can officially support PHP 7 in Drupal 7.

Jon: I will keep running PHP 7 and I think it is unfortunate that you could not use the new Ubuntu packages and if you set up a new server you'd have to pick up old packages.

Danny: I think it is important that we say in our official support documentation.

Jordan: You should be running tests locally first, Travis gives the benefit of testing on other versions.

Jon: If we can't come to an agreement on 7.x-1.x would it be beneficial to move to discussing what CLAW supports.

Danny: Yes, if we meet a couple times and can't come to an agreement then we can move on to looking at CLAW which is not burdened by an existing install base.

Jon: This is probably a policy I used to push for Drupal 7 but I certainly think that policies don't have to be written in stone.

Danny: Do we want to keep having these discussions or say that "Current policy is the policy and we support what Drupal supports."

Jared: I am fine leaving the current policy in place for 7.x-1.x as long as it is not continued for CLAW.

Jon: Ditto

Danny: Okay so should we have a new meeting around CLAW and put for a statement from the Islandora organization regarding the support for versions for Drupal 7. Also if it isn't put the Drupal 7 support policy in its own more visible document.

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Notetaker's note: Sorry if I mis-quoted anyone, trying to listen, understand, talk and type is 3 more things than I can do at once.