php 7.2 causes problems in Mahara

[Rebecca Blundell]

After upgrading to php 7.2 accidentally, I discovered it caused a lot of problems in Mahara. I'm going to investigate further and report the problems I discover on this page.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Targetting only to 18.10 as 18.04 doesn't yet officially support PHP 7.2.

[Rebecca Blundell (rjb-dev)]

Things seem better post-18.04 upgrade, which is good.

I am exploring a potential issue with failing email causing a stack trace to be sent to a user, but I haven't found a way of replicating it yet.

Behat components/dependencies need upgrading to work, but once that is done, tests seem to run Ok. Currently there is an issue with the Behat2Renderer.php file in the html report. It uses count() as a test whether object properties return null. As in 7.2 passing null to count results in a warning, running tests currently produces a long list of warnings, so we should probably change that.

[Rebecca Blundell (rjb-dev)]

Added bug to fix behat issues above: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1772792

[Rebecca Blundell (rjb-dev)]

The each() function is deprecated in 7.2, which causes a warning on the first call.
each() is used in a few places in mahara code, but mostly in 'Dwoo'. There may be an upgrade for that.