Johannes Schluter recommends that, this Easter, you not only enjoy the holiday and hunt some eggs but also do a little bug hunting at the same time:

Around Easter there are different holidays, in Germany for instance Friday and Monday are holidays. This gives you some time without annoying customers and colleagues asking you to do stuff. So what could you PHP geeks do when getting bored? - A good idea is to test PHP development snapshots.

The PHP group has put out the second release candidate for PHP 5.2.6 and is looking for a few good testers to help them find whatever issues may lie deep in its code. Accoring to Johannes, though, not much should be broken this time. It's PHP 5.3 everyone should really watch out for...

So grab a snapshot and get testing!

Sebastian Bergmann has posted about the latest release of the popular unit testing framework for PHP, PHPUnit 3.2.

I have just released a second release candidate for PHPUnit 3.2, the next major version of the xUnit testing framework for PHP.

According to the Changelog, updates in this new Release Candidate include a number of updates to the software metrics that can be run on code (at project, file, function, class and method level), the addition of DbUnit, code coverage improvements, bug fixes to the TestUI test runner and Selenium integration and much more.

Ilia Alshanetsky has noted that the latest release canidate for the PHP 5.2.x series, PHP 5.2.5RC1, is now available for download.

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 new edition directly from here (no Windows builds yet).

The Xinc project has released the latest version of their continuous integration tool (Xinc Is Not CruiseControl) - Release Candidate 1.

Xinc (Xinc Is Not CruiseControl) is a free open source continuous integration tool written in PHP 5. It currently supports Subversion and Phing but is extensible to work with any version control or build tool. Xinc is released under an LGPL license. [...] The release candidate contains an updated basic web reporting component. This can be utilized simply by copying web/index.php to a web accessible location.

Their goal is to have a release of the stable 1.0 version in about three weeks and have frozen the code base in preparation. Most of the work left to be done involves the setup of a PEAR channel (to make installation a snap) and fleshing out the documentation to make things easier for developers just coming in and checking it out.

Derick Rethans has a quick announcement today about the latest advancement on the XDebug front - the posting of the latest Release Candidate, XDebug 2.0.0RC4.

There are two major changes that needs some introduction. The first one is that the profiler_output_name and trace_output_name settings no longer accept simple values such as "crc32".

They now accept different format specifiers (think printf style). The documentation will be updated soon with this new information. You can grab this updated version directly from their site or check out some of the documentation and some of the other news about the project. Windows builds (older version) of the project are also available.

In conjunction with this other post, Ilian Alshantesky has posted his own announcement about the latest Release Candidate from the PHP group - PHP 5.2.2 RC2.

Since there were no major regressions in RC1 and RC2 only resolved pre-existing issues the goal is to proceed with the final release next Thursday. To make sure that the release is solid and does not break any existing code I would like ask everyone to test it against their code to see if everything still works as expected. If you identify any new issues since 5.2.1, please let me know.

Here's the downloads:

• http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.2RC2.tar.bz2
• http://downloads.php.net/edink/php-5.2.2RC2-Win32.zip

Edin Kadribasic has announced the release today of multiple versions of the Windows installations for the latest PHP - version 5.2.2 RC2.

The downloads are broken up into two categories:
Standard build

• php-5.2.2RC2-Win32.zip
• php-5.2.2RC2-win32-installer.msi
• pecl-5.2.2RC2-Win32.zip
• php-debug-pack-5.2.2RC2-Win32.zip

• php-5.2.2RC2-nts-Win32.zip
• pecl-5.2.2RC2-nts-Win32.zip
• php-debug-pack-5.2.2RC2-nts-Win32.zip

All other unix-based developers can download their verions from the official PHP QA website for testing.

As Ilia Alshanetsky reports today, the latest release candidate for a project he works on, FUDForum, has been released - version 2.7.7RC2.

The final release candidate of FUDforum 2.7.7RC2 is now available for download. This releases' focus has been primarily bug fixing with a fair number of small issues being resolved. I anticipate this RC will go smoothly and will be followed by a final within 2-3 weeks.

More information on the project and this new release can be found on its website or, if you're the impatient type, you can just download the install script and the upgrade script to get to work. Oh, and here's what changed...

Ilia Alshanetsky has posted a new release announcement for the latest Release Candidate in the PHP 5.2.x series - PHP 5.2.2RC1.

The focus of this release is twofold, number one we are continuing to stabilize the language, with over 60 bug fixes. The second goal was to improve the security of the language through an internal audit as well as by addressing previously unknown bugs identified by MOPB. As you can imagine both these goals result in a rather extensive set of changes, so testing to make sure no new bugs or regressions were introduced is critical.

He stresses the importance of testing this release because of a real push to get this release (with all of its bugfixes) out as soon as possible.

Downloads:

• BZipped download
• GZipped download

According to this new post on DynamicWebPges.de and a message from Derick Rethans on the php.internals mailing list, there's an issue with PHP 4.4.5 where sessions are causing segfaults when register_globals is set to "On".

As per Derick:

Because of this I'd like to release a 4.4.6 soon with this fixes. As there is also an upgrade to pcre 7.0 we'd need at least one RC, which I plan to release on Thursday.

Users of the PHP 4.4.x series should keep watch for this new update to correct the issue quickly.