PHPClasses.org has released their latest episode of their "Lately in PHP" podcast series. This episode (#31) talks some about some of the changes happening in versions in PHP in the upcoming months.

As PHP 5.5 is getting ready to be released in the next months, the end of line for PHP 5.3 is being planned, while the original MySQL extension is being deprecated in PHP 5.5 to be killed in a later version.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or you can watch the video of the recorded Google Hangout of the taping.

Greg Beaver has a warning for those developers using an older version of PEAR (1.4.4 and older) and uninstalling packages - a bug that might cause issues from an unauthorized uninstallation.

Recently, a curious bug was opened at pear.php.net for the PEAR package (#9639). In it, a user was able to uninstall the Structures_DataGrid package, even though all of its subpackages were installed, which should have prevented uninstallation.

There's been a key update to the dependency module that keeps this sort of thing from happening, but it's only in versions 1.4.5 and higher. Greg also recommends the reinstall of any packages that you've installed before and up to version 1.4.4 just to ensure that the dependency database is up to date.