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[Robert Lyon <robertl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

** Changed in: mahara
       Status: In Progress => Fix Committed

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1576448

Title:
  Drop support for PHP 5.3, starting with Mahara 16.10

Status in Mahara:
  Fix Committed

Bug description:
  As discussed at the 52nd Mahara developer meeting:
  https://wiki.mahara.org/wiki/Developer_Area/Developer_Meetings/52

  PHP 5.3 has been out of support since August 2014. We've continued to
  support it in Mahara because the Mahara software is most often used in
  an institutional setting, and institutions can be slow to upgrade
  their operating systems. But, the time has finally come to cease
  active support for 5.3 in Mahara, for the following main reasons:

  1. The latest version of PEAR, a Mahara dependency, now requires PHP
  5.4 or later. This is the first of our dependencies to drop support
  for 5.3, but PEAR is historically quite conservative and slow-moving,
  so it's probably a sign more will start soon.

  2. PHP 7 ships with the new Ubuntu 16.04 release, which increases our
  PHP version support burden. Dropping 5.3 will help even that out
  again.

  3. We no longer have any systems that actively test code against PHP
  5.3, and in the last release cycle we noticed some major session-
  related bugs in PHP 5.3 because of this. So it would be more honest if
  we stopped claiming to support 5.3.

  4. We're seeing an increasing number of 5.4-isms make their way into
  our codebase unintentionally as devs become less accustomed to 5.3
  coding standards, most noticeably the 5.4 concise array declaration
  format ($a = []; instead of $a = array()).

  Ending "active support" doesn't mean that we'll actively aim to make
  Mahara incompatible with PHP 5.3. As with Mahara on Windows, we will
  still favor compatibility where it's feasible, and will still accept
  community patches to increase compatibility. But it does mean we'll no
  longer use Mahara HQ's community support resources to make Mahara work
  in PHP 5.3.

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