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

The 0.6.3 releases have two important fixes:

• Possible erroneous ini value length have been fixed
• The fatal errors have in module and request initialization have been replaced by warnings

Thanks to Eugeny Zadevalov for the detailed reports. Eugeny sent patches to use htscanner in apache when mod_htaccess is active but without mod_php. You can find it in the README file in the release archive or CVS. We will try to keep this patch up to date.

He is working on making htscanner compatible with PHP4. I’m not a fan of supporting dead branches (I consider PHP4 as dead) but if enough users need a PHP4 version, I can push the patches upstream. In the worst case, I will add them in the release and Eugeny can maintain them. Let me know what you need!

During the season holidays, I got a couple of mails from hosting company using fastcgi and planning to use htscanner. Having system configuration automatically set by htscanner (open basedir per vhost for ex.) but not editable by the users can help to use fastcgi for shared hosts. Are you an ISP? or simply provide hosting services and plan to give htscanner support to your users? Let me know what you need.

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