In a compliment to Wez Furlong's post on his blog about filing bug reports, Mike has posted two quick items with some helpful hints on submitting a bug and submitting a patch to the PHP crew.

First off, the how-to for submitting a bug:

There will surely be the time where you find a bug in PHP, but prior submitting half hearted bug report make sure you've accomplished the following things:

• search the bug tracker if the bug has already been subbmitted
• put together a short and behaviour reproducing script
• verify the behaviour with the latest version AKA snap of PHP
• if PHP crashes, generate a backtrace.

And, in the second post, how to submit the patch:

If you once have that odd feeling that something in PHP is missing and you're brave enough to write something up (a patch) that would change that situation in your eyes, don't expect such a submission will make it into old branches.

Questions to include new features in PHP-4 or PHP-5.0 will most probably be declined (for a good reason), so the chance that the invested time is wasted time is rather high.

He mentions that if you're completely confident that your patch is needed, try applying it to the latest files in the CVS HEAD to see if it changes the behavior...