What plans and does the Omeka S development team have for moving away from the Laminas MVC component which is scheduled for end-of-life by December 31, 2025 since the Laminas Technical Steering Committee (TSC) have decided to discontinue active development of Laminas MVC.
Will Omeka S be moving to Mezzio/PSR-7?
Any information would be appreciated.
Thanks
john
Weāre aware of Laminasās recent announcement about their MVC component.
We havenāt made a decision yet on what our way forward is going to be there. Moving to another paradigm is possible, but obviously would be a pretty disruptive change for modules. Since this was only publicly announced recently, the landscape also isnāt quite settled in terms of possible migration paths, forks to continue maintenance of the MVC component, etc.
This is going to be a very difficult decision and process, I donāt envy you in trying to make the right choices here.
I will admit my one big reservation about choosing Omeka S was itās being based on Laminas MVC and how inactive it was, especially compared to the likes of Symfony, Laraval or even Django. Even were someone to fork it, the viability of that fork beyond a transitional āescapeā period would be have to be questionable.
That said, it sounds like they will support the PHP 8.5 release in November, which gets 2 years active support and 2 years security support, so thatās a 4 year window before actually running it in a secure environment becomes difficult (although any eventual removal from Packagist may be a bigger issue).
John.
As we are now approaching the end of the year, is it likely there will be a decision made anytime soon? If not, should stakeholders just keep checking this thread periodically or might there be an official webpage dedicated to this topic planned for the future?
I donāt have any updates to give at this moment, and probably wonāt until at least PHP 8.5 is actually out along with the promised release of the last supported laminas-mvc.
A release that uses that final version is quite likely, but the pathway after that is still not set in stone. Iāve already seen some forks set up to plan ahead, at least some of which look like theyāll be well supported and which could be a reasonable pathway. Long-term maintenance of a fork remains a possibility, and to my mind, not a particularly unreasonable one: a significant aspect to why the component is getting abandoned in the first place is that itās āboring.ā Years of its development have been almost entirely just mechanical updates to handle PHP version changes.
Omeka S is somewhat decoupled from the MVC layer inherently by virtue of its internal āAPIā component: most of what the system does goes through there and the controllers are generally rather minimal. But a change to a different framework or library would still probably require module changes that weād prefer to avoid. Regardless of the specific path, thatās going to be our goal in moving forward, to have a supported and maintained base but also not require sweeping changes and incompatibility. I donāt currently see a reason to believe we wonāt be able to achieve both of those things.
Weāll certainly announce a resolution when we have one, particularly in the sense of communicating with developers if there do end up being any changes theyād need or want to make.