[Blog] MergePHP, November 2025

sitemap.xml

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  <url>
   <loc>https://scherzer.dev/Blog/20251113-release-candidate-5</loc>
  </url>
+ <url>
+  <loc>https://scherzer.dev/Blog/20251118-mergephp-talk</loc>
+ </url>
 </urlset>

src/Blog/posts/20251118-mergephp-talk.md

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+---
+title: MergePHP, November 2025
+---
+
+# MergePHP, November 2025
+
+Last week, I presented "PHP 8.5: New Features from the Source" for a second
+time, this time [through MergePHP][mergephp-talk], an online meetup combining
+multiple PHP user groups. The talk generally went better than it did the
+previous time I presented on that topic, at Longhorn PHP.
+
+I ran into a few technical issues, but they were not problems that I could have
+easily foreseen, and I'm happy with how I handled them. The content was based
+on the slides for Longhorn, but I addressed the topics in a much better order
+than [last time][blog-longhorn-talk], where I focused on the deprecations and
+didn't have enough time to discuss the new features in depth.
+
+## Longhorn Updates
+I started working on the slides for my presentation the week before the talk.
+Given that I gave a presentation on the same topic at LongHorn PHP, I began with
+a copy of the slides from that presentation, before incorporating the lessons
+I learned giving the talk the first time:
+
+* Instead of starting with deprecations, and ending with new features, I put
+the new features at the start. Previously, the best/most impactful features
+were the last few slides (saving the best for last), but for MergePHP I reversed
+both the order of the features discussed and the relative order of the features
+and the deprecations, starting the talk with the features that are the most
+impactful. I also went through and adjusted the order to better match how they
+would be discussed.
+* I removed some of the deprecation slides that would likely impact the fewest
+people, while requiring the most detail to explain what changed. Specifically,
+the slides from LongHorn discussing the deprecation of building the LDAP
+extension with Oracle support, the removal of ODBC support for direct driver
+integration and old versions of ODBC.
+
+I also made sure to update the one example snippet that used the string
+"LonghornPHP" to instead use "MergePHP".
+
+The day before the talk, I also went through a final time and checked if any
+of the tooling commits marked as "PENDING" (merged but not yet included in any
+release) had been released since I last checked. I'm glad I did a last minute
+round of checks, since I was able to incorporate references to
+[PHPStan version 2.1.32][phpstan-32], which was released 2 days before my talk.
+
+## The Talk
+I think the talk went fairly well from a presentation side, but I did have some
+technical difficulties. At first, my microphone refused to connect at all,
+and I had to reboot my laptop right before the talk started - thankfully, the
+organizers were able to chat a bit to fill the air. Within a few minutes, I was
+able to connect and be heard.
+
+During the talk, however, the microphone cut out a few times. Once the
+microphone was working again, I would go back and repeat myself, but because
+I wasn't staring at the live chat, I didn't realize the microphone had cut
+out right away, and probably missed some stuff when I went back, or repeated
+some of the content that I had already covered when my microphone resumed
+working. I'm not sure what else I could have done - its not like I was in a
+moving car on a mobile hotspot, I was just sitting at home!
+
+The talk lasted around an hour, which is what I had expected. But, for the
+next time I am scheduled to give this talk, [at ConFoo][talk-confoo], the
+alloted time is 45 minutes, including 10 minutes for questions. I'll need to
+cut down a *lot* of the material.
+
+## Preparing for ConFoo
+That trimming starts now - I started my slides for ConFoo with a copy of the
+MergePHP ones, and removed the following slides:
+
+* "Deprecated: function aliases"
+* "Deprecated: no-op $exclude_disabled"
+* "Deprecated: SplObjectStorage aliases"
+* "Deprecated: unregistering all autoloaders"
+* "Deprecated: finfo_buffer() $context"
+* "Deprecated: openssl_pkey_derive() $key_length"
+* "Deprecated: driver-specific PDO parts"
+
+These all covered relatively straightforward deprecations, like replacing an
+alias with the underlying function or method. There were also a *lot* of slides
+about these deprecations, and so not talking about an entire category of
+deprecations should allow me to cut a significant amount of time.
+
+I next removed a few slides about deprecations that were unlikely to impact most
+developers or otherwise would take up an inordinate amount of time to cover:
+
+* "Deprecated: existing warnings elevated" - some behavior that triggered
+warnings is officially deprecated, but the warning messages are still logged as
+`E_WARNING`, which is considered stronger than a deprecation. The change was
+primarily to update the warning messages to indicate that the behavior would
+result in an error in PHP 9. The circumstances triggering the warning were
+unchanged.
+* "Deprecated: PDO Pgsql transaction constants" - given that the pdo/pgsql
+extension never exposed transaction state, it is unlikely that anyone was
+trying to use the transaction-related constants. I tried to find any uses of
+these constants on GitHub, but after filtering for unarchived non-fork repos
+with code in PHP, all uses that I found were either false positives or related
+to testing.
+* "Deprecated: __sleep() and __wakeup()" - while a hard deprecation here
+would definitely impact a significant group of PHP developers, a
+[late-landing RFC][rfc-soft-deprecate] converted the hard deprecation (emitting
+deprecation warnings) to a soft deprecation (updating documentation to indicate
+deprecation, but no warnings). If and when the hard deprecation returns, it
+would warrant discussion, but as things stand for PHP 8.5 the time it would take
+to explain how to update to a different serialization system could be better
+spent on other 8.5 changes.
+* "Deprecated: PDO 'uri:' scheme" - most developers are probably not fetching
+the information about what database to connect to from somewhere else on the
+internet, and I don't want to give people any ideas.
+* "Deprecated: output handler problems" - since the deprecation of the return
+value from an output handler not being a string was reverted as part of
+[PHP 8.5.0 RC5][blog-rc5], the only thing left is the deprecation of trying to
+emit output within an output handler function. Doing so will trigger a clear
+error message, and the mitigation procedure is simple - remove the attempt to
+produce output.
+
+This first round of cuts brought me from 50 slides to 38 - I'll still need to
+cut some of what I have planned, but I've made significant progress in trimming
+down the talk.
+
+If you are curious about the content of the removed slides, or any of the
+others, a copy of my MergePHP presentation is [here on my site][slides]. After
+I give this talk at ConFoo the slides I use for that will also be available.
+
+## Looking Ahead
+
+I'll continue to work on the talk between now and ConFoo. PHP 8.5 comes with a
+lot of new features - that is a good problem to have. As a release manager, and
+as the author of five of the RFCs implemented in PHP 8.5, I'm very familiar with
+a lot of the changes, which can lead to me going into more detail than needed
+when discussing the features. For ConFoo, I'll plan to bring speaker notes with
+which slides deserve more background discussion, and which slides I should avoid
+delving too deep on.
+
+[mergephp-talk]: https://www.mergephp.com/meetups/2025/11/13/php-8-5-new-features-from-the-source.html
+[blog-longhorn-talk]: ./20251029-longhorn-php#content-my-talk
+[phpstan-32]: https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan/discussions/13787
+[talk-confoo]: https://confoo.ca/en/2026/session/php-8-5-new-features-from-the-source
+[rfc-soft-deprecate]: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/soft-deprecate-sleep-wakeup
+[blog-rc5]: ./20251113-release-candidate-5
+[slides]: ./../files/20251117%20MergePHP%20presentation.pdf

tests/data/Home.html

@@ -4,8 +4,7 @@
 Computer Science and Political Science and graduating <em>magna cum laude</em> in 2024 with a Bachelor of Science degree. As part of my work in Computer
 Science, I chose to write an honors thesis in my senior year, see <a href="./Thesis">here</a> for details. I continued at Tufts for graduate school, graduating in 2025 with
 a Master of Science in Computer Science degree.</p><p>See the links in the navigation bar above for more information about my
-experience.</p><h2 class="subsection-header">Contact</h2><ul><li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-scherzer-520539263/" target="_blank" class="external-link">LinkedIn</a></li><li>Email: <code>[email protected]</code></li></ul><h2 class="subsection-header">Blog</h2><p>I also have a blog. You can see a full index of my posts <a href="/Blog">here</a>. My latest blog post is: </p><div class="blog-preview"><h3>The Story of PHP 8.5.0 Release Candidate 5</h3><span class="blog-preview-date">Thursday, 13 November 2025</span><p>PHP 8.5.0 Release Candidate 4, <a rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" class="external-link" href="https://www.php.net/archive/2025.php#2025-11-06-1">announced</a> last week, was expected
-to be the last release candidate (RC) of the PHP 8.5.0 development cycle, before
-the general availability release next week. But, earlier today I
-<a rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" class="external-link" href="https://www.php.net/archive/2025.php#2025-11-13-1">announced the release of PHP 8.5.0 RC5</a>. So, why was an extra
-release candidate needed? <a href="/Blog/20251113-release-candidate-5">Continue reading...</a></p></div></div><div class="des-footer"><div class="des-footer--content">Content is © 2025 Daniel Scherzer</div></div></body></html>
+experience.</p><h2 class="subsection-header">Contact</h2><ul><li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-scherzer-520539263/" target="_blank" class="external-link">LinkedIn</a></li><li>Email: <code>[email protected]</code></li></ul><h2 class="subsection-header">Blog</h2><p>I also have a blog. You can see a full index of my posts <a href="/Blog">here</a>. My latest blog post is: </p><div class="blog-preview"><h3>MergePHP, November 2025</h3><span class="blog-preview-date">Tuesday, 18 November 2025</span><p>Last week, I presented &quot;PHP 8.5: New Features from the Source&quot; for a second
+time, this time <a rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" class="external-link" href="https://www.mergephp.com/meetups/2025/11/13/php-8-5-new-features-from-the-source.html">through MergePHP</a>, an online meetup combining
+multiple PHP user groups. The talk generally went better than it did the
+previous time I presented on that topic, at Longhorn PHP. <a href="/Blog/20251118-mergephp-talk">Continue reading...</a></p></div></div><div class="des-footer"><div class="des-footer--content">Content is © 2025 Daniel Scherzer</div></div></body></html>

tests/data/blog-index.html

@@ -1,5 +1,8 @@
 <!DOCTYPE html>
-<html lang="en"><head><link rel="icon" href="data:,"><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, minimum-scale=1"><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/resources/default-styles.css"><title>Blog index</title><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/resources/blog-styles.css"></head><body><div class="des-navbar"><a href="/Home">Home</a><a href="/files/Resume.pdf">Résumé</a><a href="/OpenSource">Open Source</a><a href="/Work">Work</a><strong class="des-strong-page-link">Blog</strong></div><div class="content-wrapper"><h1>Blog index</h1><div class="blog-preview"><h2>The Story of PHP 8.5.0 Release Candidate 5</h2><span class="blog-preview-date">Thursday, 13 November 2025</span><p>PHP 8.5.0 Release Candidate 4, <a rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" class="external-link" href="https://www.php.net/archive/2025.php#2025-11-06-1">announced</a> last week, was expected
+<html lang="en"><head><link rel="icon" href="data:,"><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, minimum-scale=1"><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/resources/default-styles.css"><title>Blog index</title><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/resources/blog-styles.css"></head><body><div class="des-navbar"><a href="/Home">Home</a><a href="/files/Resume.pdf">Résumé</a><a href="/OpenSource">Open Source</a><a href="/Work">Work</a><strong class="des-strong-page-link">Blog</strong></div><div class="content-wrapper"><h1>Blog index</h1><div class="blog-preview"><h2>MergePHP, November 2025</h2><span class="blog-preview-date">Tuesday, 18 November 2025</span><p>Last week, I presented &quot;PHP 8.5: New Features from the Source&quot; for a second
+time, this time <a rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" class="external-link" href="https://www.mergephp.com/meetups/2025/11/13/php-8-5-new-features-from-the-source.html">through MergePHP</a>, an online meetup combining
+multiple PHP user groups. The talk generally went better than it did the
+previous time I presented on that topic, at Longhorn PHP. <a href="/Blog/20251118-mergephp-talk">Continue reading...</a></p></div><div class="blog-preview"><h2>The Story of PHP 8.5.0 Release Candidate 5</h2><span class="blog-preview-date">Thursday, 13 November 2025</span><p>PHP 8.5.0 Release Candidate 4, <a rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" class="external-link" href="https://www.php.net/archive/2025.php#2025-11-06-1">announced</a> last week, was expected
 to be the last release candidate (RC) of the PHP 8.5.0 development cycle, before
 the general availability release next week. But, earlier today I
 <a rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" class="external-link" href="https://www.php.net/archive/2025.php#2025-11-13-1">announced the release of PHP 8.5.0 RC5</a>. So, why was an extra