Johannes Schluter recommends that, this Easter, you not only enjoy the holiday and hunt some eggs but also do a little bug hunting at the same time:

Around Easter there are different holidays, in Germany for instance Friday and Monday are holidays. This gives you some time without annoying customers and colleagues asking you to do stuff. So what could you PHP geeks do when getting bored? - A good idea is to test PHP development snapshots.

The PHP group has put out the second release candidate for PHP 5.2.6 and is looking for a few good testers to help them find whatever issues may lie deep in its code. Accoring to Johannes, though, not much should be broken this time. It's PHP 5.3 everyone should really watch out for...

So grab a snapshot and get testing!

Antony Dovgal points out that Derick Rethans has added the snapshots for PHP 5.3 to the snaps.php.net website.

Short list of what you can find there: Namespaces, __callstatic() magic method, accessing static members through $foo::myFunc(), fully rewritten ini-parser with .htaccess-like user defined ini files for CGI/FastCGI, improved OpenSSL extension, PCRE 7.4, and other fixes and improvements that will never get into 5_2 branch.

He recommends teching throughly before the major release to find all of the bug before the general public does. Builds for both source and Windows systems have been posted.