4.0 | Zend.Debug.CodeAnalyzer: remove sniff

[jrfnl]

Description

Recreation of upstream PR squizlabs/PHP_CodeSniffer#3802:

I have the impression that the Zend Code Analyzer tool as stand-alone tool is no longer available. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I propose to remove the sniff which allowed for running that tool via PHPCS in PHPCS 4.0, along the same lines as was already done for external JS/CSS tools in commit ea52e7b.

Suggested changelog entry

The Zend.Debug.CodeAnalyzer sniff has been removed

[jrfnl]

@weierophinney Just checking - have you got an opinion on this proposed sniff removal ?

[weierophinney]

@jrfnl Go for it. We've been actively steering customers to XDebug for years, as (a) Zend Debugger was only ever supported in Zend Studio, and (b) Zend Studio was last actively developed in the PHP 7.1/7.2 timeline, making it irrelevant to most users regardless.

[jrfnl]

@weierophinney Thank you for confirming what I suspected. I will go ahead and soft deprecate this in 3.9.0, hard deprecate in the last 3.x minor and remove in 4.0.

[jrfnl]

Rebased without changes to get rid of the merge conflict and to check something: the build for this PR should fail as the Squiz ruleset.xml file still references this sniff, which would result in a "ERROR: Referenced sniff "Zend.Debug.CodeAnalyzer" does not exist." error if the ruleset is used.

If CI does not fail on this, we are missing a QA check and that needs to be addressed.

[jrfnl]

If CI does not fail on this, we are missing a QA check and that needs to be addressed.

The missing QA check is being added now via PR #868

[fredden]

We should also remove this line:

PHP_CodeSniffer/src/Standards/Squiz/ruleset.xml

Line 31 in 66e178b

<rule ref="Zend.Debug.CodeAnalyzer"/>

[jrfnl]

We should also remove this line:

PHP_CodeSniffer/src/Standards/Squiz/ruleset.xml

Line 31 in 66e178b

<rule ref="Zend.Debug.CodeAnalyzer"/>

Exactly (that was the reason to add the QA check in #868). Local branch has already been updated, didn't push (yet) as I'd have to keep rebasing. It's included in the 4.0 line up though, so we'll get to it some time this week.