Contributing to PHP: How to Fix Bugs in the PHP Core
Previously, we covered contributing to PHP’s documentation. Now, we will be covering how to get involved with PHP’s core. To do this, we will be looking at the workflow for fixing a simple bug in the core.
Since submitting new features to PHP has already been explained pretty well, we will not be covering that here. Also, this article does not seek to teach PHP’s internals. For more information on that, please see my previous posts on adding features to PHP.
Resolving Bugs
Fixing bugs in the core is a great way to gain a basic familiarity with PHP’s internals. It only requires a basic knowledge of C and is an easy way to help with the effort of improving PHP. But before doing so, a basic familiarity is required with PHP’s version management.
PHP Version Management Lifecycle
PHP minor versions follow a yearly release cycle, and each minor version has 3 years of support. The first 2 years provide “active support” for general bug fixes, and the final year provides “security support” for security fixes only. After the 3 year cycle has ended, support for that PHP version is dropped.
The currently supported PHP versions can be seen on the php.net website. At the time of writing, PHP 5.5 is in security support, and PHP 5.6 and 7 are in active support.
Fixing a Bug
To demonstrate a basic workflow, let’s resolve bug #71635 from bugs.php.net. The bug report states that there is a segfault when invoking DatePeriod::getEndDate() when no end date is available. So the first thing we will want to do is confirm its validity.
For bugs that look trivial (with little or no environmental setup requirements), we can begin by quickly seeing if the bug can be reproduced in 3v4l. (3v4l is a handy tool that runs a snippet of code on hundreds of PHP versions.) This allows us to see all of the affected PHP versions, which is handy to quickly find out if older, still supported versions of PHP are affected. As we can see, PHP exits with a segfault for all versions 5.6.5 through to 7.0.4.
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