Add a branch without an upper PHP version limit

[oliverklee]

Also automatically rebase it from main.

[JakeQZ]

As I understand, this would be a branch available via Composer like the -dev branch, but would not have any 'releases'. Or could it have automatic mirrored releases, with some kind of suffix (like there is -alpha and -beta - though I'm not sure what suffix we should choose for these, or if there is a precedent set by other projects)? People would then be able to use it via Composer in situations where the upper PHP version limit is restrictive in ways we haven't foreseen.

[oliverklee]

As I understand, this would be a branch available via Composer like the -dev branch, but would not have any 'releases'.

Exactly. And we can regularly rebase it on the main branch (or automate that via a GitHub action).

[oliverklee]

AFAIK, there is no naming convention for this.

[mvorisek]

@mvorisek, thanks for sharing your experience; useful feedback and good to know. Feel free to further comment on #1210 there.

I maintain several large php projects and the simplest and most powefull solution is to not drop older PHP versions support too early. The PHP changes needed between PHP 7.4 and PHP 8.0 are minimal. The only limitation is how early a new PHP features can be uses, but they are mostly syntactical sugars...

The most important thing is to test everyting using CI - here is an example https://github.com/atk4/core/blob/9a3ff6928/.github/workflows/test-unit.yml#L80 which tests also if the lowest deps pass all tests.