Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 55. Today I'm talking with Ignace Nyamagana Butera after he'd asked me on Twitter, how PHP deals with bugs. A few episodes ago, I did a Q&A session about the RFC process. And this time again, we'll have Ignace Nyamagana Butera asking the questions. Would you please introduce yourself?

Hello, everyone. Hello, Derick. My name is Ignace Nyamagana Butera, but you can call me Nyamsprod. I've been a PHP developer for around 15 years now. Currently, I'm working as a software developer, and technical lead in the internet content provider agency. When I have free time, I'm doing some open source, I have a couple of projects that you may have heard of, like, league CSV and league URI. I created them and I am currently maintaining them.

Yeah, as I said, it is not me asking the questions as you this time. So I think we should jump straight in actually.

So my first question will be somehow really simple, because we are talking about bugs. And I was wondering if we had some statistics about bugs in PHP.

Though there are some statistics. I mean, it's not really easy to get that information out of our bug system. But just having had a look, it's about on average, maybe one bug a day gets reported at the moment or is nearly 80,000 bugs in the bug system of course, not all of these are closed, some of them are open, but the majority of them are closed.

Do bugs from the EOL PHP still being taken into account or we just say: okay, these bugs for instance, are for PHP five, will no longer look at them.

If it's a bug, unless it's a security bug fix, we won't look at them for unsupported PHP versions. So at the moment, PHP, seven three, and seven four are still supported. So those bugs will of course look at, if it's a security bug, we only will go back to PHP seven two. If it's reported to any older version and seven two for example, seven one or seven zero, or even PHP four or five, which does happen occasionally, we'll tell them to upgrade first because we won't spend time doing that.

Because I manage and maintain open source project. I know that PHP as a language is used everywhere and you can have multiple reports. First thing first, what is a bug? Because there are multiple definition of it.

And I'm sure if you asked 12 people, you get 13 definitions. I think it is unexpected behavior of something that is documented. So if something is documented do this, and it does something else, or it does something really wrong like crash your program, then that will be a bug.

What is the source of truth? Is it the PHP documentation? Is it the PHP specification language, what