Blogger Importer: Undefined (dynamic) properties

[ironprogrammer]

Under PHP 7.4, the Blogger Importer plugin causes notices like the following:

If new posts are imported:

Undefined property: Blogger_Importer::$posts_done in ../blogger-importer/blogger-importer.php on line 408

Background

​f1c9d6a7 introduced several dynamic properties to the Blogger_Importer class, such as counters for skipped and imported posts.

In PHP 8.0 dynamic properties log as warnings, ​in 8.2 as deprecations, and in 9.0 result in fatal errors.

[jrf]

Sounds like something which should be reported in ​https://github.com/WordPress/blogger-importer instead ?

[ironprogrammer]

Replying to jrf:

Sounds like something which should be reported in ​https://github.com/WordPress/blogger-importer instead ?

Per https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/49143#comment:4, importers are still under the Core Trac umbrella, which seems confirmed with their WordPress GitHub org consolidation via ​https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5550.

But yes, addressing importer issues does feel like an upstream matter. However, given the near invisibility of those repos, and lack of attention they're likely to get on their own, it seems appropriate to continue to report and track these issues here (and the community appears to feel the same).

[jrf]

Per https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/49143#comment:4, importers are still under the Core Trac umbrella, which seems confirmed with their WordPress GitHub org consolidation via ​https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5550.

But yes, addressing importer issues does feel like an upstream matter.

@ironprogrammer I see... It just feels like more noise while the issue cannot be solved in Core, but should be solved in the plugin repo.

However, given the near invisibility of those repos, and lack of attention they're likely to get on their own, it seems appropriate to continue to report and track these issues here (and the community appears to feel the same).

Which actually highlights a much more pertinent problem, for which it may be a good idea to have a discussion on Make: there are quite a few repos in the WP GitHub organisation which do not seem to have a dedicated maintainer(s) attached to it.

All Core committers do have commit rights to those repos AFAIK and occasionally some of them (us) use those rights to merge things, but it seems like, for the most part, these repos are unmaintained and even when something does get merged, there is often no CI/QA in place, there is no documented release process and nobody takes responsibility....

Considering the code of some of these packages ships with Core and/or is actively promoted by Core, like the Importer plugins, it is my opinion that this needs to change.

In a lot of cases, the maintenance burden will be small, once the initial backlog (no CI, no CS, no tests) has been addressed and will mostly consist of keeping up with PHP changes, keeping the CI running and passing etc, but having someone take "ownership" for each of those projects would help and clarify communication lines as well.

/cc @dd32 @ocean90 (as I seem to remember I've seen both of you active in some those repos on occasion)

[dd32]

Historically we tracked WordPress-Importer issues via Core Trac, mostly as there were no other places for it, and it's been treated as "part of WordPress". Other importers were tracked here, once again, as there was no better place for it.

Now that GitHub repo's exist for them, I think it makes sense that we track issues for Importers in their individual repo's, but accepting bug reports for the Importers via core.trac.wordpress.org and migrating them seems reasonable to me (As not all reporters will have a GitHub account, or are aware of that as a location of tracking them).

The other importers have been very hit-and-miss when it comes to maintenance, but still only active WordPress / WordPress.org contributors have worked on them.

The migration of the plugins onto GitHub is a relatively recent thing, and has mostly been to ease the burden of how to manage maintaining the plugins that were only within plugins.svn.wordpress.org and which had limited committers, and limited visibility into how to propose changes to the importers.

Core Committers did not have commit access on GitHub to all of the importers (only WordPress-Importer), but I've gone through and granted the team access now.

In other words: I agree, this should be reported to and worked on in the GitHub repo, but if a report comes in from a WordPress contributor I would accept the report here and offer to migrate it over if need be.

[jrf]

FYI: I've done a quick scan of all these repos now with bleeding edge PHPCompatibility and send in some PRs to fix the most obvious issues.

[ironprogrammer]

This issue was addressed with ​version 0.9.1.

Per discussion starting with comment:1 above, any further issues with the importer should be filed upstream at ​https://github.com/WordPress/blogger-importer/issues.