Monday, 22 January 2007

PHP 5.2.1 RC 3 Released with a Brief Update on PHP6

The third release candidate for PHP5.2.1 is now available for download. This release boasts of more than twenty different bug fixes resolving issues like the tempval leak inside foreach(), says Ilia Alshanetsky.

The stability of this release will determine the final release of PHP 5.2.1 or another RC. The developer team does not anticipate any regressions to be introduced by this release candidate; That said, users are encouraged to test this release against their code base, and report any issues here.

The tarballs can be found in the following locations, while the Win32 binaries will be available soon:

http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.1RC3.tar.bz2 (d3889eda8c3471ce7cf2adb35a4de736)

http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.1RC3.tar.gz (c5b3e5540d1951d4c4b976b8a39c09ab)

PHP 6 IS NOT VIABLE, SAYS ILIA

While it was not a directly related to the announcement of the 5.2.1 RC3 release, a reader reacted to the news of the PHP 5.22.1 RC 3 releases with a query on the status of PHP 6. The reader commented that since a lot of functions and features are being included in the PHP 5.x series, the interest in PHP 6 seemed to be on the wane. Further, the progress on the PHP development wiki indicated that a beta release was still very far away. To this Ilia replied that he didn’t think PHP 6 was viable at this stage. While he has worked on the shmop and curl extensions in PHP 6, Ilia isn’t too interested in pursuing those development efforts further. He has opined that PHP 6 is very far from stable and equally far from being usable.