I have tried to use the sparkline plugin today and it failed with:

    remote: PHP Fatal error:  Cannot use 'Object' as class name as it is reserved in /usr/share/php/sparkline/Object.php on line 71        

... at built time. I have tried to follow the instructions in [[plugins/sparkline]] but those *also* failed with because php5 is long gone from Debian, of course. The `libdigest-sha1-perl` package also seems gone, so I have tried this:

    apt install libsparkline-php php-gd php-cli

... but that is how I ended up with the above failures. I suspect the embedded PHP code in ikiwiki needs to be ported to PHP 7 (or 8 now?)...

But really, maybe, the sparkline Perl library should be examined again. Surely it's not *that* bad that we need PHP around here, do we? It looks like [SVG::Sparkline](https://metacpan.org/pod/SVG::Sparkline) could be a good candidate although there's also [Text::Sparkline](https://metacpan.org/pod/Text::Sparkline).

Or maybe sparklines are dead... <http://sparkline.org> doesn't even resolve... Time flies, doesn't it? -- [[anarcat]]

> I hit this a little while ago and ended up ditching the sparkline plugin. But, if it
> is to be resurrected, I would agree with ditching PHP here, too. For my use-case the
> data changes so infrequently ([this graph](https://jmtd.net/log/all/500x-graph.png) of
> blog posts by year, not including the current year) that I manually generate something
> in LibreCalc annually, and copy the resulting picture in.
> *— [[Jon]], 2023-01-20*
