@vkurdin thanks for helping us to backport this fix but we do need to have the tests as well. Maybe cherry-picking the original commit(s) and addressing the the conflicts would be a better solution?

@lcobucci no conflicts introduced after cherry-picking the original commit to 2.5 branch. On the other side new functionality was added: EntityRepository::count method. Is that ok to introduce new feature to 2.5 branch?

@vkurdin we shouldn't introduce new features on 2.5 but don't we have any test that ensures that we're returning the correct type on that method (not even an assertSame())?

I've meant tests for BasicEntityPersister#count(). If we don't we should probably do something about that on 2.6 as well

@vkurdin I've found (on v2.6) the test that covers this method and, unfortunately, we are using assertEquals() and not assertSame(). So it's fine to merge this on 2.5 but we should fix BasicEntityPersisterTypeValueSqlTest#testCountEntities() on master (eventually).

https://github.com/doctrine/doctrine2/blob/be18256a93352831ec72ee7ef03337d463de0354/tests/Doctrine/Tests/ORM/Persisters/BasicEntityPersisterTypeValueSqlTest.php#L160-L163

@vkurdin 🚢 thanks for your contribution!