PHP Core Roundup #16
Published on September 1, 2023 by Roman Pronskiy
Welcome back to PHP Core Roundup series! This is where we highlight and celebrate the improvements made to PHP during the month past by the PHP development team, members of the PHP Foundation, and more.
The end of the summer season is quiet for new RFCs, but updates to the PHP core are active, and include branching out the upcoming PHP 8.3 version, a recent RFC, and multiple fixes.
The end of the summer season is quiet for new RFCs, but updates to the PHP core are active, and include branching out the upcoming PHP 8.3 version, a recent RFC, and multiple fixes.
PHP 8.3 Branching Out
PHP 8.3 has reached its feature-freeze, and release managers branched out the PHP-8.3 branch on August 31.
Now that PHP 8.3 is in a separate branch, the master branch will be the development source for PHP 8.4. Bug fixes and other improvements will be cherry-picked for PHP 8.3 (and older branches) as appropriate, but new features that are made to the master branch will not be merged to the PHP 8.3 branch.
Tools that build PHP based on the Git branches will also see a new branch, and the builds from the master branch will be named “PHP 8.4” for the first time.
Releases
The PHP development team released five new versions in August 2023:
These releases include several bug fixes and improvements, notably in areas such as CLI, Date, Core, DOM, FFI, Hash, MySQLnd, Opcache, PCNTL, SPL, and Standard.
All three include security fixes: GHSA-3qrf-m4j2-pcrr and GHSA-jqcx-ccgc-xwhv.
PHP 8.2.9 and PHP 8.1.22 additionally include several bug fixes and improvements, notably in areas such as Build, CLI, Core, Curl, Date, DOM, Fileinfo, FTP, GD, Intl, MBString, Opcache, PCNTL, PDO, PDO SQLite, Phar, PHPDBG, Session, Standard, Streams, SQLite3, and XMLReader.
Recent RFCs and Mailing List Discussions
Changes and improvements to PHP are discussed, reported, and voted on by the PHP Foundation Team, the PHP development team, and contributors. Bug reports are made to the PHP issue tracker, changes are discussed in mailing lists, minor code changes are proposed as pull requests, and major changes are discussed in detail and voted on as PHP RFCs. Documentation and the php.net website changes are also discussed and improved at their relevant Git repositories on GitHub.
Hundreds of awesome PHP contributors put their efforts into improvements to the PHP code base, documentation, and the php.net website. Here is a summary of some changes made by the people behind PHP. Things marked with 💜 are done by the PHP Foundation team.
RFC Updates
In Voting: Support optional suffix parameter in tempnam by Athos Ribeiro
RFC proposes to add a new optional suffix parameter to the `tempnam()` function.
A suffix could provide even more semantic value or context for a user inspecting the generated files, and, in specific situations, could even provide more context for software processing such files. Right now, users can only add a prefix.
Merging postponed: PDO driver specific sub-classes by Danack
This RFC proposed to introduce driver-specific `\PDO` sub-classes so applications can granular declare the specific PDO drivers they support.
This RFC vote was completed and accepted unanimously, but due to the implementation complexity, the changes for this RFC were not finalized before the PHP 8.3.0RC1 release.
Because PHP 8.3 is beyond its feature-freeze and now that the first release candidate is released, the consensus seems to be that this RFC will not be implemented in PHP 8.3 but on the next PHP version.
Because PHP 8.3 is beyond its feature-freeze and now that the first release candidate is released, the consensus seems to be that this RFC will not be implemented in PHP 8.3 but on the next PHP version.
Documentation
While PHP 8.3 has moved to the RC cycle, the documentation available on php.net, requires updating.
George P. Banyard 💜 has triaged issues in the docs and marked several of them as "good first time", which are ideal easy picks if you would like to start contributing to PHP docs. You can find the full list on GitHub.
To make it easier to view the results of changes locally, Anna Filina has prepared a Docker Compose set-up. Check it out.
Merged PRs and Commits
Following are some changes that did not go through an RFC process because they are either planned, bug fixes, or progressive enhancements.
Full list of commits since PHP Core Roundup #15. Commits are in the order they were added, grouped by author in alphabetical order.
Full list of commits since PHP Core Roundup #15. Commits are in the order they were added, grouped by author in alphabetical order.
We are incredibly grateful for the commitment and dedication of all contributors. Stay tuned for next month's roundup as we continue to make PHP better together.
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