I certainly feel a bit like a fool. Anyways some of you might have read Toby's April fools joke. While we are not implementing GOSUB, PHP 5.3RC2 is put on hold for now. It seems like all core developers are currently busy with other things than finishing up PHP 5.3 or they are working behind the scenes on hopefully nothing all to grand or problematic in PHP 5.3. At least communication is at essentially zero atm. Since I am a tooth-less "manager" .. actually more like a cheerleader and moderator .. I guess I will lean back, wait and see until people are ready to play ball again.

So it seems there are a few choices to get rid of PHP 5.1.6 that comes with RHEL5. Why get rid of it? Because I want to use a version of PHP that was released in the last few months or even year and not something that is a few years old and relies on the vendor to backport security fixes into a branch that is officially dead by the parent project. The obvious choice would be the RH AppStack. At a reasonable price it would be an easy sell to my customers. However the price is far from reasonable if you do not care to also get a license and support for JBoss in the bundle. So I guess if I want to still sound all enterprisey it seems I have two choices: Oracle RPM's or Zend Server. I have not really looked at pricing of the support options there. Obviously its tricky to introduce yet another support provider into the mix, since sysadmins love that "one throat to choke", but if the pricing is competitive enough it could work. I guess I will need to sit down and give the two a whirl one of these days. If anyone is in the same situation or better yet managed to get out .. please let me know in a comment.

I did not sign a pledge (did not hear about this until today) to blog about a woman in IT I admire on Ada Lovelace Day, nor am I going to mention any women in particular in this blog post. I hope that I have always made it clear in my communication that I respect people based on their actions and nothing else. I do want to pick up on what I have noticed and tried to put an end to at conferences when I encountered it. I never blogged about this and probably I should have, but now that I am seeing that many fellow developers also feel its a hinderance (actually the biggest one) to create an environment where gender is not a factor in judging contributions.

Well there is much to blog. After all I did not blog in ages. Then again there is too much and too little time. So just briefly, I had a great time in Tanzania. Anyone who is considering traveling there feel free to mail me for advice. I also been to the phpconit in Rome last week and gave two talks. Really enjoyed it down there. Very good food of course and various people that I had not met in person yet. Especially meeting Matteo was great and it seems like he will now even become an official contributor to PDO! I also chatted with Stefan a bit about DJing (expect a big announcement - well big for me - in this department soon) and Symfony 2.0 (Liip is currently giving Symfony another look).

This is a question you should be asking the developers of the framework you are using. Same of course goes for any PHP application you care about. Maintainers of said projects should just click here (check the user guide for details) and subscribe an email alias to their QA list (do not subscribe personal email addresses .. people move on .. go on vacation or get hit by a bus). We announce all PHP releases on this list (actually until now we have only announced RC's, but we are expanding this to also cover alpha and beta releases).