Ilia recently published the probably final release candidate of the current stable tree: PHP 5.2.4RC2. The stable release can be expected soon. This release fixes quite some bugs from older versions and does a few minor adjustments. Please test the RC release so unexpected regressions can be detected and fixed before it's marked stable. If regressions and other problems aren't detected now it will take a few months till the next version will be released, so do your best to make sure it's worth being called stable! Please file found issues, after checking for other reports and the documentation, into the bug tracker. The recent trend to report bugs using blogs isn't working well!

In other news one could read that there were also some major improvements in the development of PHP 6 made: Next to all that Unicode related work which was made over the last months PHP got, due to Andrey, mysqlnd as PHP-optimized replacement for libmysql and, thanks to Dmitry's work, namespace support. So this weekend might be the perfect time for sending you're family visting other parts of the family, letting them sweat on some beach or having fun at some theme park - then you can sit down, relax, and, after testing PHP 5.2.4RC2, give that new stuff in PHP 6 a test.

For getting started with PHP 6, which you can get, as you're hopefully used to, from the snaps site, you should first read Andrei's slides about Unicode and PHP 6. The most important Unicde+PHP facts are also collected inside a README file. For namespaces there's, again, a README file, David Coallier has written a nice summary and Stanislav wrote a short FAQ. If you are curious what mysqlng is: simply read Ulf's blog postings or Andrey's slides.