On the roadmap: deprecation of PHP 7.4

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I know that is basically no chance to have the decision reverted, respectively deferred for one version. But just to mention what we just became aware of:

  • For Debian Bullseye users it is currently impossible to upgrade either Nextcloud to 26 or Debian to Bookworm the regular way. They are basically stuck.
  • Nextcloud cannot be upgraded to v26, because it requires PHP 8.x while Debian Bullseye provides PHP 7.4.
  • Debian cannot be upgraded to Bookworm, because it provides PHP 8.2 which is not supported by Nextcloud 25 yet.
  • With PHP 7.4 they cannot upgrade because Nextcloud 26 doesn’t support it anymore, with PHP 8.2 they cannot upgrade because Nextcloud 25 does not support it yet, so that the updater cannot even be reached.

Which way around it is turned, either Debian made one PHP jump too much, or Nextcloud supports one PHP version too few to have Debian Bullseye users unstuck.

Two way to get unstuck:

  1. The one I much prefer, after having Debian upgraded to Bookworm and PHP 8.2:
    sed -i 's/>= 80200/>= 80300/' /var/www/nextcloud/lib/versioncheck.php
    Nextcloud 25 works fine with PHP 8.2. It throws some deprecation warnings, but we anyway do this only once to get to the updater to Nextcloud 26.
  2. Install PHP 8.0 or 8.1 from outside the Debian package repository, e.g. from Ondrej’s PHP repo. But I wrote above that it can cause a lot of long-term trouble as essential system libraries (libssl and others) are pulled as well from that repo, which can cause hard to resolve dependency conflicts when you ever remove the repo again.
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