#dev 2026-07-14

2026-07-14 UTC
grufwub, bterry1, ax562, fluffy, GWG, GuestZero, barnaby, blacklight, chr0m4_, WinnerWind, lavandula, [pfefferle], ZodiacalComet and deathcomestotime joined the channel
#
Zegnat [schmarty]: interesting! I was being a bit stubborn when I returned to my PHP lib and wanted to keep PHP 7.0 compat :P So far I have succeeded, even PHPUnit runs in the whole version matrix
#
[schmarty] [Zegnat] šŸ’Ŗ i can appreciate that! i'm reluctantly letting myself be dragged into the 8.x lines and forget 7.x šŸ« 
#
Zegnat I feel like the PHP ecosystem has gotten a lot better about updating, so that is probably worth it
#
Zegnat It is just that I do not want to go back into PHP and find it has become the same package churn as JavaScript-land
#
[schmarty] the pace of 8.x updates, and some of the specific changes, sure have felt like churn for my team at work!
#
Zegnat Oh no!
barnaby joined the channel
#
Zegnat Well, if you ever have a need to extract links from HTML, my library is 7.0+ but does support things like the HTML parser from 8.4 ;)
#
[schmarty] tiny team, ancient codebase, long _looooong_ tail of deprecations to triage. the official end-of-life schedule combined with third-party libraries that only promise to support non-EOL versions means it's also on fire. i don't love it! šŸ˜„
#
[tantek] The PHP maintenance team broke my trust with how much they broke in 8.0
#
[tantek] Iā€™m still tracking down bugs introduced as a result
#
[tantek] I would advocate for keeping 7.x compat bc that's the last "stable" version as far as Iā€™m concerned
#
aaronpk i am also burnt out on php package management
#
aaronpk i've just started using as few packages as possible
#
[artlung] always the correct stance. but then, there are some great packages (points vaguely at some indieweb ones)
#
[tantek] Right, and we can maintain that high quality reputation by continuing to support 7.x
#
Zegnat There is some other infra churn. E.g. I get the Dependabot warnings for the IndieWeb organisation telling me there is a CVE in PHPUnit
#
Zegnat But I have not felt the motivation to go and close those alerts yet
#
Zegnat Soon doing any real supporting of 7.x will just get harder because it becomes harder to run the same test files on your 7 branch and your 8 branch
#
Zegnat I use 4 separate versions of PHPUnit to confirm compatibility https://github.com/Zegnat/php-linkextractor/blob/c5a7cd5c7b120948e57006bd10833226283eebcb/composer.json#L23 :(
#
[schmarty] šŸ˜ž
#
[artlung] Spinning up different virtual machines for php versions is straightforward - but version-diverging Tests are very much a bummer.
#
Zegnat [artlung]: any specific setup you would recommend? I have a castor script that runs a bunch of docker commands to test the different versions ... works-on-my-machine sort of guarantee :P
girlonthemoon and [snarfed] joined the channel
#
[snarfed] wow. you can't run more than one version of PHP on the same system?!
#
[schmarty] debians/ubuntus can use http://packages.sury.org to run multiple PHPs on the same system. VMs like docker make some sense for further isolation, tho'.
#
doesnm docker is not VM T_T
#
[artlung] [Zegnat] my experience with has been using GitHub testing flows that run test suites with multiple virtual machines defined, each with different PHP versions.
#
Zegnat [snarfed]: I have done it, but find that packaging quickly goes weird. And this seemed to work on both my personal linux machine and my work macOS
#
[artlung] you can see this best in WordPress - which provides for a matrix of PHP and MySQL versions. https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/blob/trunk/.github/workflows/phpunit-tests.yml
#
Zegnat [artlung]: ah, yeah, there are a bunch of CI options that support some way to define a matrix. But I really wanted my tests to be portable/local
#
[artlung] ah. I can't say I've done that. But I know on Mac there are mechanisms with homebrew to use different PHP versions at difference paths
#
Zegnat Base homebrew has removed everything pre 8
#
Zegnat But yeah, I used to juggle versions with homebrew on macOS :)
#
Zegnat I guess the fun part of having a library nobody uses that is only tens of lines, is that I get to try out weird stuff like keeping my tests running for every PHP version since 7.0 :D
#
aaronpk i run multiple php versions on my servers
#
[artlung] I have been old enough to have used the extension `.php3` for files and make a distinction for handling in Apache between that version and 4.
srijan and Saige_Leah joined the channel
#
[pcarrier] that's about when I started PHP yes.
saccharin left the channel
#
gRegor thought that might have been when it was Personal Home Page, but 3 was when they changed it apparently
#
[artlung] https://lab.artlung.com/php-php3-mod-rewrite/
#
gRegor I remember some .htaccess rules to make .phtml files work too
barnaby, MD87, joshproehl, moose333, jeremycherfas, vriska and dabeglavins5 joined the channel
#
Zegnat I think I was mainly introduced to the .htaccess rules to make PHP run without needing a file extension at all, haha
ax5623 and cotsuka joined the channel