The Great Upgrade

[gregcorbett]

Several parts of GOCDB are in need of a version uplift.

There is an core chunk of stuff around PHP, Composer and Doctrine.

• PHP: Add support for PHP 8 #513, with 8.3 currently being the latest
• Composer - we use composer 1, which is being deprecated in favor of compose 2.
• Doctrine - we use a version of Doctrine 2 which is no longer supported and Doctrine 3 is upcoming. There may also be some quick wins in this area, see Move to newer version of Doctrine (2.5 at least) #335 .

It's probably better to tackle this in a bottom-up/iteratively fashion (i.e. how high can we upgrade doctrine before we need to upgrade another component first) rather than a "go for the head" of going straight to PHP8 and dealing with the fallout.

Other things to update

• Various JavaScript libraries, at the very least under htdocs/web_portal/javascript. We should also look at using CDNs for these, see Use javascript libraries from a CDN rather than shipping them #336 .

[gregcorbett]

It's probably better to tackle this in a bottom-up/iteratively fashion (i.e. how high can we upgrade doctrine before we need to upgrade another component first)

And many, smaller, pull requests are probably much better than big one that does everything.

[gregcorbett]

we use composer 1, which is being deprecated in favor of compose 2.

Once #509 and #494 are merged, this can be ticked off as the composer files have been tested using and are supported by composer 2 (in fact, our environments are set up such to always use the very latest version of composer 2).

[gregcorbett]

As an update on this - I see the next steps as:

1. Drop PHP 5.4 support: Drop PHP 5.X support #494 - after 1st July 2024

Shortly after that, rebase and merge:

2. Unit test against more versions of MariaDB: Unit test against newer versions of MariaDB #511
3. Update ORM to 2.11 (or as high as we can go above that, maybe even 3): Update ORM to 2.11 #455

Sometime after those,

4. Add support for PHP 8+: Add support for PHP 8 #513.

[gregcorbett]

Once #509 and #494 are merged, this can be ticked off as the composer files have been tested using and are supported by composer 2 (in fact, our environments are set up such to always use the very latest version of composer 2).

#509 and #494 are now merged!