Tsugi improvements over the next few months

[Charles Severance]

Hi all,

I hope all is going well and Tsugi continues to meet your needs.  I just wanted to give you a year-end update talking about my plans for Tsugi for the next six months.

Every summer we move to the next version of PHP.  Next summer we will be going from PHP 8.4 in the master branch to PHP 8.5.  

I have a nice solid PHP 8.4 tag from September after a whole summer of production experience https://github.com/tsugiproject/tsugi/tree/25.9.1

The goal of the next six months is to clean up some tech debt so when we upgrade dependencies and advance the PHP version things are as easy as possible:

Here are some things already in progress to give you a sample:

- Improve the unit tests (already done)

- Improve the PHP doc (already done)

- Check for correct versions of curl, php and charset in admin and issue warnings if problematic (already done)

- Switch all use from htmlent_utf8() to htmlentities() - the default is UTF-8 since PHP 5.4

- Disable the non-CURL code from Net.php with a warning - then later remove it

- Rewrite the code in koseu-php to eliminate the lumen-framework dependency (I have been lucky that the lumen folks released a PP 8.4 version but I do’t want my luck to run out) - Koseu is the UI parts of sites like www.py4e.com - Lessons / Gradebook…

I will be doing these slowly and conservatively and upgrade my 30 production services pretty much right away to make *sure* there are no regressions.

If you are running close to master (like me) - feel free to let me know or just drop a note to the dev list.  Also you should follow the three repos:

https://github.com/tsugiproject/tsugi/

https://github.com/tsugiproject/tsugi-php/

https://github.com/tsugiproject/koseu-php/

Like I said I will be doing conservative things and putting them into my production immediately to make sure master stays stable.

Then in April / May the great PHP 8.5 transition and dependency advancement will begin :)

Let me know if you have any questions.

/Chuck