PHP 8.4

[jadestorm]

Hi folk, I can see there has been a lot of work done on PHP 8 support but I am under the impression that it is not considered fully ready to go? Please correct me if I am wrong. While I'm here, however, I wanted to ask if PHP 8.4 is the target since 8.1 is deprecated at the end of the year.

As a data point -- we migrated our Scalar instance to 8.1 quite a while ago, and 8.4 a week or so ago, and have seen no new problems appear. At least for our purposes, it seems good to go.

[craigdietrich]

As a (small) organization we're not keeping up on PHP versions enough to keep on top of their releases and plan accordingly. I usually wait for XAMPP to release their updates to get newer versions of PHP to test out on. They're currently on PHP 8.2. So, it's great to hear that things are working on 8.4.

We're of course always open to suggestions. Maybe there's a tool or plugin we can incorporate to better keep track of things like this?

[jadestorm]

Hi Craig! I'm not really aware of any tools that would really help. Since my role is in IT Systems, I am basically forced to pay attention to all of this. You'd probably have to spend a lot of time and energy writing unit tests and set them up to test every bit of Scalar to truly make sure you are still functioning under newer PHPs. So long story short -- not sure there's a great solution.

MOST likely 8.2 support would be quite compatible with 8.4. I just remember it was a bit of an experiment for us to try running Scalar under 8 instead of 7 a few years ago and it went fairly well.

Actually I did a quick Google search and this looks promising: https://github.com/PHPCompatibility/PHPCompatibility
I may look at using that with some of our in house apps.

Anyway -- you are welcome to close this if you wish as it was mostly an inquiry rather than a true issue. =)

[jadestorm]

Tell you what -- I'll submit you a PR with the configuration bits needed to use this if you want to check it out.
One Caveat -- I just looked at PHPCompatibility's issue tracker and I'm not convinced it is truly being updated anymore -- there's issues to track support for 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, and 8.4 that are incomplete. Still -- it's reporting back some interesting stuff already so .. give me a few. =) Just as an example here's some of the bits it returned:

FILE: /home/daniel/scalar/system/helpers/captcha_helper.php
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUND 3 ERRORS AFFECTING 1 LINE
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 322 | ERROR | Function mcrypt_create_iv() is deprecated since PHP 7.1 and removed since PHP 7.2; Use random_bytes() or
     |       | OpenSSL instead
 322 | ERROR | Extension 'mcrypt' is deprecated since PHP 7.1 and removed since PHP 7.2; Use openssl (preferred) or
     |       | pecl/mcrypt once available instead
 322 | ERROR | The constant "MCRYPT_DEV_URANDOM" is deprecated since PHP 7.1 and removed since PHP 7.2
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


FILE: /home/daniel/scalar/system/helpers/text_helper.php
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUND 1 ERROR AFFECTING 1 LINE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 263 | ERROR | preg_replace() - /e modifier is deprecated since PHP 5.5 and removed since PHP 7.0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Stay tuned.

[craigdietrich]

I feel like anything to do with mcrypt is self-correcting. Meaning, we have a library installed that will automatically roll over to another encryption technique when mcrypt goes away. So we can probably ignore those warnings. Also, we're not using a lot of helpers, like the text helper or the captcha helper. Just something to consider.

This will be a big help, though, for future proofing Scalar! Thanks for the PR (which I'll go over to now).