From time to time, for some random reasons or none at all, you end in the radar of what is commonly called “poisonous people”. It is this time of the year again. As I can still sleep well, it is getting to a point where I may loose my coolness. I’m trying hard to do not get there.

Possible solutions or good advices are listed in these two chapters/sections, time to read them again:

• You are what you write

• The ‘Noisy Minority’ Effect

Getting some fresh air, continue the good work as well as enjoying the fantastic teams we settled in the last few months will help me to quickly forget (and ignore) the noises.

While working on the windows ports and updates of the libraries required by php (more on that later), I met a couple of extensions without maintainers, without commits or simply inactive.

As an attempt to either moved them out of core or to give them the love they need, I made a post on internals.

There is one extension that we are going to remove without affecting any code, mhash. Thanks to ext/hash and Scott (he ported the missing algorithms and is adding the mhash API to keep the compatibility). That will drop one PHP dependency (libmhash).

Other “affected” extensions are not so lucky:

• ncurses
• fpdf
• snmp
• interbase (aka firebird)
• frontbase
• sybase
• sybase_ct

In this list one is definitively dead, sybase. There is a little hope for some of them. ncurses and fpdf will be maintained and released in PECL (Thanks Hartmut).

interbase / firebird may remain as we found someone able to test the extensions whenever needed and to valid any windows builds (Thanks Lester). That will help to keep firebird/interbase support in php but not to continue its development (unicode support, firebird 2.1 new features, etc.). See below if you are interested to work on it or if your company is interested.

Just lilke firebird, we found a Sybase_ct lover able to provide not only help by testing but also a server to run the test suites using a decent sybase server (Thanks Timm at 1und1). The details on how it will work are still being discussed but there is a good chance that sybase_ct will be kept in core.

SNMP will remain in 5.3 but its days are counted as there is no developers. I can help someone else to maintain but I can definitively not take the hand on it. It is not a widely used extension but it works well and actually helpful and handy. I’m sure someone out there must be interested enough to stand up and help us to keep this extension in core (see below)

Frontbase has less chance, I’ve mailed Frontbase to inform them about the situation. I have no idea about their interest in PHP (more about webobjects .

Interested in any of these extensions and willing to help? Know someone in the companies behind sybase or frontbase and could help to get them interested in PHP? Drop me a mail (see the contact form) or introduce yourself on the internals mailing lists