Technical Advisory Group Meeting October 27th 2017 2:00 pm AST

• Chair: Daniel Lamb

• Notes:

• Attending:

  • Jared Whiklo
  • Rosie Lefaive
  • Will Panting
  • Bryan Brown
  • Derek Merleaux
  • Danny Lamb
  • Jonathan Green

Agenda

• PHP 5.3 Support
  • https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-build/pull/1236

Minutes

The group discussed the ongoing issue of maintaining continuous integration support for PHP 5.3. A significant portion of the community is using PHP 5.3 (30% by our estimates), many due to institutional policies on infrastructure. But the majority of the effort in maintaining that compatibility comes from other organizations, who are becoming increasingly less concerned about PHP 5.3 and less willing to devote time towards it.

After a recent effort to change OS versions to Precise to ensure the availability of older PHP versions, another issue has surfaced and TravisCI is currently failing all tests on PHP 5.3.3. For the release, only README and documentation fixes are being merged until https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-build/pull/1236 is resolved. The release managers are faced with a decision on how best to proceed with their upcoming deadline.

TravisCI has recently announced that it has retired Precise, and although the environments will still be available, no further work on it is guaranteed. https://blog.travis-ci.com/2017-07-11-trusty-as-default-linux-is-coming

In order to handle the possible scenario of Travis failing 5.3 support when there is no community effort to work around it, the group has decided on a course of action when that event transpires. If no one is willing to step up to maintain the test infrastructure, a PHP 5.3 syntax checker will be run on the codebase to still provide some limited support for the older version. Danny will proceed with messaging about the situation and decision to the community. Also, upcoming releases will contain "recommended versions", encouraging users to update to at least PHP 5.4.