Ahnii!

Second in the PHP 8.5 upgrade series . The first post covered the floor-bump mechanics. This one is about what 8.5 surfaced when the floor moved and how the sweep cleared it.

Mission: php-8-5-upgrade-01KR8DN2 , work package WP02. Merge commit e0f8cb57 . The CHANGELOG entry for alpha.176 records the verification: 34 PHPUnit deprecations to 0, across 7,497 tests.

The starting number

Before WP02 ran, the test suite was emitting 34 deprecation warnings against 8.5. That number does not measure how broken the codebase was. It measures how dense the test corpus is. A weaker test suite would have surfaced fewer warnings because fewer code paths run during CI.

PHPUnit's deprecation handling matters here. Waaseyaa runs PHPUnit in strict mode where deprecation messages are captured and counted per test, not just printed.…