Drop support for PHP 5.3, starting with Mahara 16.10

[Aaron Wells]

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.

[Mahara Bot (dev-mahara)]

Patch for "master" branch: https://reviews.mahara.org/6441

[Mahara Bot (dev-mahara)]

Reviewed: https://reviews.mahara.org/6441
Committed: https://git.mahara.org/mahara/mahara/commit/fd630ce8c9d7f70c6ca1dae98c14b3354efced82
Submitter: Robert Lyon (<email address hidden>)
Branch: master

commit fd630ce8c9d7f70c6ca1dae98c14b3354efced82
Author: Aaron Wells <email address hidden>
Date: Fri Apr 29 11:37:12 2016 +1200

Dropping support for PHP 5.3

Bug 1576448. As discussed at the 52nd Mahara developer meeting.

behatnotneeded: Can't test in Behat (requires environmental
changes.)

Change-Id: I6cdfb0c154077f597128b7c3c1fd86b40b36c772