Warning about updating to latest bleeding edge as of 2024-01-09

[30knees]

There is a vendor dependency psr/cache that some other modules may also rely on. Updating crashes the site if you have modules that also rely on it and that have their own versions. datakick is seeing whether he can remove the dependency from the core.

[datakick]

This has been fixed. If anyone is interested what went on, here's s summary. 

Thirtybees contains vendor directory that have third party libraries that core depend on. We need smarty template engine to render templates, guzzle http client to send http requests to api server, tcpdf library to generate pdf, and others. These dependencies causes few problems

1. some libraries have different implementaions for different PHP versions -- that's the reason why we have different PHP builds. We can do that as long as the library interface remains the same
2. by having these libraries in the core vendor directory, they are autoloaded first. This can cause conflicts with modules

In this particular case, we updated library mobiledetect/mobiledetectlib to latest version 4.8.09. That versions depends on yet another library psr/cache version 3.0. Previous versions of this library did not have this dependency. After update, core vendor directory contained psr/cache version 3.

Unfortunately, a lot of modules (for example mollie) also uses this library, and have it in their respective vendor directory (modules/mollie/vendor). But because this library is already loaded by core, it will not be loaded from module vendor. If the module uses different version of library, than things can go bad very quickly. And that's what happened here - mollie requires psr/cache v1, but got psr/cache v3, and PHP raised exception.

The fix was for us to remove the original library  mobiledetect/mobiledetectlib from core -- it was replaced by library module tbdetectmobile. 

Now, this is not the complete fix, because there is still a compatibility problems between tbdetectmobile and mollie module -- both modules can't be installed at once. But at least it's not conflict between core and mollie module.

We have released the tbdetectmobile module in different versions, that you can choose from

1.  very old version for PHP7.4  - https://github.com/thirtybees/tbdetectmobile/releases/tag/1.0.0
2. version for php8 that does not have dependency on psr/cache - https://github.com/thirtybees/tbdetectmobile/releases/tag/1.1.0
3. version for php8 that have dependency on psr/cache - https://github.com/thirtybees/tbdetectmobile/releases/tag/1.2.0

If you have a module that depends on psr/cache v1, you can't use tbdetectmobile v1.2, but you can use tbdetectmobile v1.1

It's a mess, I know, but it's the best solution I could found.

In the future, we will release another version of tbdetectmobile that will change namespace of library dependencies, so it does not pollute global namespace. With that in place, the module will work correctly even if there is another module that have its own version of psr/cache library. Until that is done, you need to manually choose the correct version of the this module to use.

It would be great if all modules did that -- but we can't really force that on third party modules.

Side note:

the mobile detection is used by core for two things only:

1. to display mobile theme variant. As far as I know, almost none of the themes support this -- there needs to be a /mobile/ directory inside your theme that contains overrides for themes. If this directory exists, then thirty bees will use templates from this directory when request comes from mobile device.
2. to disable some modules on mobiles/tables:

Some third party modules might also depend on mobile detection. But, generally speaking, if you don't use these features, then you don't have a need for device detection, and you don't have to install the tbdetectmobile at all. Without this module, the response will be always identical for mobiles, tables, and desktop. With this module installed, the response can be different.