Announcement: dropping support for PHP < 7.2

Setting the scene

At this time, Requests is compatible with PHP 5.6+, 7.x, and 8.x

This is a very wide range and is a compatibility span of more than a decade.

With this ticket, I'd like to propose limiting the range of supported versions a little.

Proposal

I would like to propose to drop support for PHP < 7.2

Planning

Requests 2.1.0 is intended to be a security and stability release.

Security fixes should be available to the widest range of PHP versions possible, so knowing we'll include security fixes in the 2.1.0 release, means that is not the right time for a PHP version drop.

So the proposal would be to drop support for PHP < 7.2 in Requests 2.2.0 and for that version to be released quite quickly after the Requests 2.1.0 release.

Consequences

The fast majority of packages using Requests pull Requests in via Composer (with the big exception being WordPress).

For Composer users, Composer will handle the version negotiation and can still install the 2.0.x or 2.1.x version if necessary.

Based on the PHP version stats available via Packagist, the PHP version drop would affect 2.2% of the users of this package.

As for WordPress... WordPress has dropped support for PHP < 7.2 in WordPress 6.6, which was released in July 2024.
Support for PHP < 5.6 was dropped in WordPress 5.2, which was released in May 2019.

WordPress has a liberal security backport policy and AFAICS, backports are still being done as far back as WordPress 4.7, which means that security patches currently would already need to be made compatible with older PHP versions than the ones supported by Requests.
With that in mind, I don't think WordPress using Requests and backporting security fixes should be regarded as a blocker for Requests dropping support for PHP < 7.2.

Opinions ?

The issue names Composer and Requests 2.2.0 but no files, tests, or entry points. Start by resolving the support-policy proposal and identify the compatibility checks that would need updating; done means an agreed PHP >= 7.2 policy is reflected consistently for the 2.2.0 release.