I am currently developing the Review Quality Collector (RQC) plugin. It will not be ready for submission before spring.
PHP 5 has end-of-life on 2019-01-19.
So when I start writing tests now, may I assume only PHP 7 support will be needed by the PKP/OJS developers?
Anybody else could still run OJS with older PHP versions if they absolutely have to, but could not run the test suite and could not use the RQC plugin itself (which already uses the ?? operator and so will require PHP 7 as well – which I consider a feature, not a bug).
Given that PHP 5.3.3 is still actively supported by some distributions (looking at you, RHEL) 4 years after PHP stopped supporting it, I have no expectation that January will be a hard deadline for 5.6.
As a note, the recent PKP Sprint in Heidelberg had a subgroup which discussed Testing within the Plugin architecture. @asmecher may be able to point to insights gleaned from that group. I will raise the question of PHP versions and requirements and testing generally within the Technical Committee, but as a plugin developer you are certainly welcome to set the requirements for your own plugin to be PHP7 or better.
Hi all,
The results of the sprint group should be published on the PKP blog very soon (sorry for the delay on these) – but in the meantime, the short story is that you can use a .travis.yml script formulated like the one in the static pages plugin to get an OJS install and run tests with it.
Note that this .travis.yml script only works with the master branch at the moment – there were some necessary changes in the OJS repository that we didn’t back-port. The master branch will be released as OJS 3.2 and from that point we’ll be maintaining these test scripts across multiple branches (i.e. stable and development).
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team