The latest weekly summary for the PHP mailing lists has been posted over on the Zend Developer Zone. This week, discussions included:

• Sandboxed semaphores
• Focus on *printf [continued]
• PHP 5.2.1 RC2 and PHP 4.4.5 RC1
• It's all in the HEAD

Descriptions of each of the headings are provided, including code and a "short version" for those on the run.

Be sure to check back each week for a new summary.

According to this new post from Ilia Alshanetsky's blog, he's wrapped up new versions of his PECL extensions, Fileinfo and GDChart.

Just finished packaging Fileinfo 1.0.3 that finally builds on both PHP 5.1 and 5.0 properly. You can download the new version by running "pecl install fileinfo" or download the tgz file from here.

I've also made the release of GDChart 0.2 that is nearly a complete rewrite of the extension, originally written by Rasmus that allows it to work with PHP 5.1. This extension wraps around the bundled gdchart library and allows you with just a few lines of code draw 20 different graphs types.

The GDChart package looks especially useful, making it a simple matter of feeding in the data you want to render and out popps a graph. Previously, there's been this functionality via other scripts, but it's nice to see something native...