How can I have my trait extend a class

I understand that by definition, a trait cannot extend a class, however I'm wondering if there's some kind of workaround.

My situation:

I created the package revisionable, which in its first incarnation was a class that you extended from your model which itself extended Laravels base Eloquent class, however over time there were plenty of requests to change this into a trait, so people could use revisionable, and be able to extend their own base class.

Currently, the only that I can think to allow for both an extendable class, and a trait, is to offer both as a whole files, which means I'm repeating the entire code in two files which could easily lead to trouble down the road.

I'm wondering if anybody knows of some solution where I can have one file that is god, and the other file relies on it.

Rules

The existing class cannot use a trait, as existing users of the package on php 5.3 will not have access to traits.

Solution

There's absolutely no way to accomplish what you want.

Since Laravel itself (in 4.2) has now abandoned PHP 5.3, it's time to move on too.

Tag a new release that drops the class, add a PHP 5.4 requirement to your composer.josn file, and add this information to your docs.

Anyone still stuck on 5.3 can always just composer require your previous version.