[pkg-php-pear] Disruptive alert: PHPUnit 6 (and Symfony 3) transitions

[David Prévot]

tl;dr: phpunit 6 (then symfony 3.4) will soon be uploaded to unstable.
Some issues are expected in (build-)dependencies, and will need to be
dealt with (we may get rid of some packages along the way).

Hi,

[ PHPUnit ]

phpunit 6(.4) has been in experimental for a few weeks (6.3.0-1 was
uploaded at the end of September). Since phpunit 5 will be EOL in a few
months, we should not wait for the last minute to deal with this
transition (we’ll hopefully have time to transition to PHPUnit 7,
expected by the end of 2018 if upstream keeps its pace, before the
Buster freeze).

On the bright side, I “only” expect to see some “FTBF — broken tests”
RC-Bugs pop up because of this update. At worst, we can deal with those
after the upload of phpunit 6 to unstable (worst of all, the testsuite
may be temporarily disabled until the issues are properly dealt with).
On the other hand, over 80 packages build-depend on phpunit, so it may
trigger some work.

[ Symfony ]

The next LTS version of symfony (3.4) is currently making its way
through NEW (but 3.0 has been in experimental long before Stretch got
frozen). I don’t expect Symfony 4.4 (the following LTS) to be released
before Buster freezes, so we’ll probably end up with symfony 3.4 in
Buster. Again, we should not wait for the last minute to deal with this
transition.

Some packages should become uninstallable in unstable once symfony 3.4
is uploaded there. On the bright side, only a dozen of packages should
be concerned, and I’m maintaining about half of them.

[ Proposed plan ]

I don’t expect to have much time to prepare and fix in advance any
issues these transitions will bring, so I’m in favor on proceeding ASAP
in order to have as much time as possible to deal with the fallout
before the freeze.

Unless someone wants to deal with those issues beforehand in a timely
manner, I propose to upload PHPUnit 6 to unstable in about three weeks
(around mid-November), or later if I’m swamped in something else in the
mean time.

Depending on how that goes, I’ll follow up with the Symfony 3.4 upload
to unstable once most of the PHPUnit issues have been dealt with.

[ What’s next? ]

phpunit and symfony are currently handled on a best effort basis, active
(co-)maintenance for any or both of these stacks of packages are much
welcome.

I don’t intend to spend too much time dealing with (leaf and
low-popcorn) outdated packages in our archive: if nobody is able to
actively maintains them, they probably should not be part of Buster.
IOW, maybe not all RC-bugs triggered by this transition needs to be
fixed, some clean up is probably useful in our archive.

Regards

David

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