Bouncer is now ready for Laravel 11 🥳
Bouncer has long tried to maintain support for a huge matrix of Laravel versions, simultaneously. However, as the list of versions grows, it becomes untenable to support them all in a single codebase.
The commit to support Laravel 11 has over 2,500 lines of additions/deletions. The test suite was upgraded to PHPUnit 11, and now uses Workbench to run tests against a real Laravel app. Trying to do all that while supporting a huge matrix of Laravel and PHP versions is nigh impossible.
So this version of Bouncer, v1.0.2, makes a clean break: we now only support Laravel 11 and up. If you're using older versions of Laravel, you'll still be fine with Bouncer v1.0.1.
While contemplating this change, I wasn't sure whether to make this a major new version. It doesn't feel like a major new version, but is it a breaking change?
I asked on Twitter, and @michaeldyrynda helpfully pointed me to this pertinent article by @sebastiandedeyne: Composer, semver, and underlying dependency changes.
In it, he quotes directly from semver.org:
What should I do if I update my own dependencies without changing the public API?
That would be considered compatible since it does not affect the public API. Software that explicitly depends on the same dependencies as your package should have their own dependency specifications and the author will notice any conflicts.
In other words: since Composer will handle this correctly, it's not considered a breaking change. If you're not yet on Laravel 11, Composer will keep you on Bouncer v1.0.1, chugging along nicely till you're ready to upgrade.
