We just published an update on the success of the PHP 8 Compatibility Community Project and we wanted to build on that progress with the announcement of a new Community Project.
While working on the PHP 8 Compatibility Community Project, we noticed interest in not only updating libraries to PHP 8 compatible versions, but also in updating all other dependencies to the latest versions. We think that's a great idea! The newest versions of libraries not only bring bugfixes and security improvements to the framework, but also allows Magento developers to take advantage of the latest functionality. We are grateful to the contributors who are paying attention to that direction and have already proposed several updates via GitHub issues and pull requests.
To gather all these community efforts together, prioritize them, and speed up delivery to the mainline code we are launching the Platform Health Community Project!
If you’d like to contribute to the project, or just watch the progress, you should visit the Platform Health backlog project board. All the issues related to the project can be found there in appropriate statuses/columns. Feel free to self-assign any issue in the “Ready for Development” and “Good First Issue” columns. The backlog is going to be topped up as new versions of dependencies are released.
Also, if you are reporting an issue or opening a PR related to the project, you can add it to the project board by adding the “Project: Platform Health” label.
If you’d like to participate in the project as a maintainer or simply watch the progress of your pull request (PR) being processed, visit the Platform Health PRs project board.
To ensure the flexibility and isolation of the project, we have introduced dedicated mainline branches named “platform-health” to all Magento project repositories. They are based on the 2.4-develop mainline branch. If you contribute to the project, create your working branches from “platform-health” and use it as the base branch for PRs.
Having a separate base branch not only ensures flexibility and controlled isolation of the project, but it will also accelerate pull requests delivery because there is no competing delivery queue!
If you are interested in this initiative, do not hesitate to join the #platform-health slack channel in the Magento Community Engineering Slack workspace.