Note to the testers, if switching to older version is not viable, alternatively you can always look for all the lines changed in the patch and replace the 5.3.3 there by your current PHP version + 1, to force the tests to fail. 1) Try installing Moodle, both with the web and the cli installers with an older (than 5.3.3) version (or with the hack commented above). At very early stages (before the environment checks) you should get a message about 5.3.3 being required for Moodle 2.5. 2) In a running Moodle site, go to the admin/index.php page, change your PHP version to older (than 5.3.3) version (or with the hack commented above). Every page loaded should lead to message about 5.3.3 being required for Moodle 2.5 3) In a running Moodle site, run any CLI script currently using config.php (basically any of the admin/cli ones). With your PHP version being older than 5.3.3 or the hack commented above in place, you should get a message about 5.3.3 being required for Moodle 2.5. Note that, for future checks/testing... I've created MDL-39007 about to unify all those checks.