Long story short: in the coming months, the Symfony core contributors should focus their efforts toward stabilizing the existing features instead of working on new ones. At this point, backward compatibility and stability are more important than everything else.

He highlights some of the points that come along with this effort including less refactoring for the sake of refactoring, fixing more bugs/edge cases and writing more tests/documentation. He gets into some of the specifics of this kind of thinking and points out the things that can and can't be changed during this time. He talks more about stability and suggests that not only can it help enhance performance but it could also help motivate more projects/corporate users to start using the framework.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.9. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 50 bug fixes, several of which are security related.All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

Four security enhancements/fixes are specifically mentioned - a problem with imagerotate, a crash that can happen when extracting zip files, a problem with explode and empty strings and a segfault in json_decode. The full Changelog is here.

You can get the latest download from the downloads page on the PHP.net site (or your favorite mirror).

The latest version in the PHP 5.2.x series has been released today - PHP 5.2.7:

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.7. This release focuses on improving the stability ofthe PHP 5.2.x branch with over 120 bug fixes, several of which are security related. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

These security updates include an update of the PCRE version, fixing an incorrect order with php_value, correcting a possible overflow in memnstr and more. Check out the full Changelog for more information on these updates and improvements. You can download this latest update from the PHP.net website (or your favorite mirror).

This RC includes a fair number of fixes since our last release and predominantly works on improving the stability of the 5.2 tree as well as including a small number of minor security fixes. I'd like to ask everyone to test this release against your code and setups, we are aiming for a quick release cycle and user feedback is critical for a successful release.

You can download this latest version here.