Andy files a bug

A colleague of mine, Andy Wharmby, sent me a link the other day.

http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=39320

Terribly exciting, no? Well, maybe not for you. But a bunch of us in IBM were quite happy.

Andy's got a cool job right now, which is: learn the innards of the php runtime. As IBM is getting more serious about PHP, we figured we had to get our fingers into the fun stuff, especially since we have a little experience with virtual machines and runtimes like this. Andy, for instance, has been working on the Java VM for a while.

Even so, getting a bug report like this filed doesn't seem like such a big deal; it's open source baby! My mom could submit bugs reports. But my mom doesn't work at IBM. We're fairly strict about work-related open source activities, after some of the events that have transpired over the last few years; we need not speak of that. Strict means getting approvals, etc. And to be precise, it's not the filing of bugs that anyone in IBM cares about, but shipping code, and by implication, submitting proposed fixes. Which Andy did. It's not an impossible chore to get this stuff done, but it takes some time to get everything lined up.

Everything's lined up.

BTW, Andy's fix was accepted with a small tweak from the Marcus and some eagle-eyed code checking from Pierre ... good to see the community keeping us honest.

Oh, Andy, I can't seem to find your blog. Where is it? :-)

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Photo "the squashed bug", with a nice CC license, by [n]. Found using the Create Commons Search Site.