PEAR packages and PHP 7.4

Question

I am upgrading to CiviCRM 5.56.1 on a Drupal 9 application. I started getting errors on files missing and I realized that the following PEAR packages were missing:

• DB_DataObject
• HTML_QuickForm
• HTML_QuickForm_Controller

I installed the packages with pear install since these are old packages that are not on packagist.

Question 1: Is there a documentation page listing all PEAR packages required?

Right now, I get a few PHP syntax errors related to those packages, running on PHP 7.4. For example, "continue" targeting switch is equivalent to "break". Did you mean to use "continue 2"? DataObject.php:4255 and syntax error, unexpected 'new' (T_NEW) in /usr/local/lib/php/HTML/QuickForm/Controller.php on line 213. These make sense since, for example, HTML_QuickForm_Controller had its last release in 2009.

Question 2: Am I missing something here? Does CiviCRM has dependencies that do not support recent version of PHP, even though CiviCRM core states that it supports PHP 7.4?

Answer 1

I was updating from an early version of CiviCRM (4.7.30) to the latest one, together with an upgrade from Drupal 8.7 to 9.4. I had to do progressive updates i.e. to 5.26.2/8.8, then 5.51.3/8.8, then 5.56.1/9.4.

I was initially missing the civicrm/civicrm-packages in composer - I thought if it is required it should be a dependency of civicrm/civicrm-core. Apparently that's not the case, so I had to add it as a dependency of the application.

I still had some issues due to civicrm/civicrm-core not properly declaring its dependencies in earlier versions e.g. 5.26.2, so I had to add 1 or 2 PEAR packages in the application's composer.json to go through that step and then remove it after moving to the latest version that does declare its dependencies correctly.