i’m using an application based on CakePHP 2.x and have a question regarding Long Term Support, because CakePHP 4.x seems to be released soon. In your Roadmap there is the following official statement:
We recognize that there are still a number of applications running on 2.x so we plan on supporting 2.x with:
Bug fixes for 12 months after the release of 4.0.0.
My question is, what is the meaning of Bug fixes in relation to the essential underlying software stack on the server?
My server is running with the following configuration:
Apache 2.4.x
PHP 7.1.x
MySQL 5.7.x
Of course I know that supporting upgrades to future higher major versions is not self-evident. I’m simply talking about UPDATES until EOL of the different components. So what is with the currently supported latest major versions? Will CakePHP 2.x receive Bug fixes when there are problems after updating the underlying software stack? Or is this not part of the Long Term Support?
Thank your for listening and I hope this question can actuall be answered.
The meaning of bugfixes in that announcment is regarding CakePHP itself, not any other software you may be using it with.
For example, we’ll continue to fix bugs found in CakePHP code that will not break compatibility, but not add support for PHP7.2, or MySQL 8 for example.
if your example also applies to earlier software versions for which CakePHP was oficially procounced as compatible in the past and which existed already during the normal active support phase - then yes, that sadly answers my question. I’m afraid that CakePHP could become useless over night when the underlying software just gets maintained inside their formerly compatible major versions and even if the long term support for CakePHP has just started one day before.
But I can not estimate how likely this is at all for the different components. Can you remember if such an incident (minor version updates within common software stacks like LAMP) caused problems in the past? I don’t mean upgrading to a higher major version - I just talk about very common maintenance updates you normally cannot prevent within the minor version.
I don’t understand this statement. Are you concerned that CakePHP would be broken by patch releases of other software in your stack? From my memory bugfix releases for PHP and MySQL are very safe and don’t break CakePHP apps.
You could install them into docker containers and try and run your application tests. CakePHP 2.x is no longer supported so if you run into problems you’ll need to fix them in a fork as we aren’t doing additional releases of 2.x.
Either live with the “problems” of running old CakePHP with old PHP versions or invest the time to upgrade/migrate your app.
With CakePHP 3 the PHP Composer has been introduced and therefore the whole framework structure has changed. Upgrading CakePHP 3 => 4 isn’t that bad so thats not the problem.
But yet I would still recommend you to start a fresh CakePHP 4 app and manually migrate your apps logic to the new app. There is no simple “Upgrade now” button like in Wordpress.
