Remove support for libmysql-client from mysqli test suite

[cmb69]

Since mysqli can no longer be built against libmysql-client, there is no longer the need to distinguish.

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By the way, do we really still support MySQL < 5.0?

[nikic]

Nice!

[iluuu1994]

By the way, do we really still support MySQL < 5.0?

It's so old I could find a reference to when support was dropped, but even 5.0 was EOL a decade ago. So definitely not.

[andypost]

if mysqli depends mysqlnd why that not pointed in config.m4 file? moreover mysqlnd has it names as config9.m4 which means it will be loaded later mysqli

[cmb69]

It's so old I could find a reference to when support was dropped, but even 5.0 was EOL a decade ago. So definitely not.

The documentation disagrees:

The mysqli extension allows you to access the functionality provided by MySQL 4.1 and above.

We should do something about this. :)

if mysqli depends mysqlnd why that not pointed in config.m4 file? moreover mysqlnd has it names as config9.m4 which means it will be loaded later mysqli

I guess that should be addressed as well.

[kamil-tekiela]

Please drop the $version variable altogether from this file.

[kamil-tekiela]

The documentation disagrees:

The mysqli extension allows you to access the functionality provided by MySQL 4.1 and above.

I don't know what changes were made between MySQL 4 and 5 that would make it incompatible with mysqli. The fact is that MySQL 4.1 is the lowest possible version for ext/mysqli, but I don't know if we actively test support for this version. I think the tests are not even suitable for execution with MySQL 4. We certainly cannot guarantee that ext/mysqli still works with MySQL 4.

I can't imagine any sane project running MySQL < 5.6, and even that version has lost official Oracle support last year. But the truth is that there are a lot of insane developers who might still be using MySQL 5.5 or older in production.

I think it's safe to assume that ext/mysqli will work fine with MySQL 5.5 or newer, but we don't officially have a supported version bracket. It might work without any issues with MySQL 4 too. Things get more complicated when we consider MariaDB, Percona or other MySQL-like databases. Personally, I am still stuck with MariaDB 10.3/10.4 and I haven't tested 10.6 yet, not to mention 10.9, 10.10, or 10.11. I hope that PHP can still work with all these newer versions, but I can't guarantee it.

Why do you ask? I know we have some code in mysqlnd that checks for MySQL bugs in 5.1, but other than that we shouldn't have version-specific code.

[cmb69]

I know we have some code in mysqlnd that checks for MySQL bugs in 5.1, but other than that we shouldn't have version-specific code.

There are a lot of mysqli_get_server_version() checks in the test suite (more than 50), and many check for very old versions (5.0.x). We could simplify the tests a bit, if we officially drop support for such old versions. And of course it would be nice for users to be able to check the documentation and to know what to expect.

[kamil-tekiela]

I think we can remove these checks from tests anyway. We haven't been paying a lot of attention to them in recent years and if you tried to execute the test suite on MySQL 4, you would definitely get a lot of failures. We are not testing ext/mysqli against old MySQL versions (correct me if I am wrong) and I don't expect we will be doing such tests in the future.

[cmb69]

I think we can remove these checks from tests anyway.

Okay, I'll come up with another PR soonish (PDO_MySQL should also be checked accordingly).