iBlog - Ilia Alshanetsky

The first release candidate of PHP 5.2.0 has just been released. The source packages can be found here:
http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.0RC1.tar.bz2 (fa36d378f7f1fd547b881b6323ae2c60)
http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.0RC1.tar.gz (e217195c90e123acce0c2f71ac07f88d)

Given that it took a few months to reach this point and addition of new features was allowed the changelog already looks extremely impressive. Some of the key changes include things like 3 new extensions (filter, json and zip), the date extension had the rest of its functionality enabled, much work was done in terms of getting PHP 5.2 to run faster and more efficiently (in terms on memory usage). There have also been nearly 80 bug fixes made to existing functionality, which hopefully translates to a more stable release.

As the RM for this release, I'd like to ask everyone to download and try this PHP version on your software, see if the code still runs properly and hopefully faster then it did before. If you come across any problems please let the developers know by posting to the QA mailing list, internals mailing list or simply reply to this blog entry. All feedback will be appreciated.

A quick note to anyone building PHP with cURL or http extension support as well as one of the MySQL extensions (mysql, mysqli and pdo_mysql). The MySQL binaries found on mysql.com are built against yaSSL as opposed to the more common openssl against which libcurl (usede by cURL and HTTP extensions) is linked. The conflict between the two libraries causes curl initialization of the SSL layer to fail preventing startup of the PHP extensions.

To fix this problem you can either use older mysqlclient binaries (5.0.18 works) or compile MySQL yourself against openssl, either of these two will allow a working build of PHP with MySQL and curl support.