Drop support for legacy versions

[andrewnicols]

The minimum supported version of Moodle is now 4.1.
The minimum supported PHP version is therefore 7.4.

[james-cnz]

What would this mean for plugin developers still wanting to support Moodle 4.0 and have CI? Would running moodle-plugin-ci version 3 still keep the old checks?

[andrewnicols]

Generally speaking we don't support those versions of Moodle but we don't break it for existing versions of our tooling.

I would strongly suggest you upgrade away from Moodle 4.0. It has been completely out of support for a while now.

[james-cnz]

Oh, we're not running 4.0 ourselves, I'd just like to be able to do CI on bug fixes for my plugin for those who are. 13% of my plugin's users are still on 4.0. There seems to be a long tail on Moodle upgrades.

[stronk7]

In general we try to "align" all our tools to support the same Moodle versions, sometimes being more "generous" with some.

Right now, the one marking the requirements is moodle-plugin-ci which in its current v4 version requires PHP 7.4. That implies that any Moodle branch being able to work with PHP 7.4 is supported. And basically all the rest of tools (moodlecheck, codechecker, moodle-cs, ...) follow that.

And, the very first version of Moodle supporting PHP 7.4 was Moodle 3.8.3 and 3.9.0 (source).

In any case, note that the next jump will be PHP 8.1 (surely) and that will raise the Moodle required versions to be 4.1.2 and up (source).

So, indeed, moving plugins to supported Moodle versions is always a good thing to do. You always can play with branches or conditionally using different moodle-plugin-ci versions to keep the old versions tested.

Ciao :-)

[james-cnz]

OK, thanks Andrew and Eloy.