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Huge bug in PHP not fixed for over SEVEN years

A famous (the most popular?) web development language -- PHP -- completely can't work with Oracle database (the most popular RDBMS for high-end business solutions), if connection is UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoded.

This bug has been reported for the first time... seven years ago (!!!) and still hasn't been fixed, though to fix it, dev team would have to change one line of the source code (!!!) and recompile sources. So, it seems this is one of the biggest IT fuckups ever.

It goes like this:

  • Most popular web coding language and
  • Most popular high-end relational database management system
  • can't work together, if they both use the most popular text encoding standard -- UTF.

I used most popular three times in one sentence and that is why it is beyond my imagination, how this could remain still unfixed? But there's a lot more.

For me this is one of the biggest IT fuckups, mainly because:

  1. This bug has been first time reported in October 2005 and it remains unfixed now over seven years,
  2. One day after reporting it, dev team closed bug, claiming it is fixed, for the next six years they haven't noticed that they actually not fixed anything (see comments and history to bug #35003),
  3. Though I reported (six years later) that the bug remains unfixed, no one at PHP's dev team took care about it and reopened the bug report, so at least other developers could notice that they haven't fixed anything,
  4. In the mean time, after six years after first one, someone has opened another bug report with exactly the same problem and this time provided suggested solution to fix the bug and then it turned out, that all is need to fix this bug is to change one line of source code and recompile sources.
  5. Even after getting ready solution, directly to their hands, PHP developers hasn't take any care to fix the problem and over a year and half after providing solution, in hasn't been incorporated into sources of PHP,
  6. There are many more bug reports covering the same problem and many, many blogs, forum posts, webpages etc. talking about it, but it seems that this is still not enough to enforce PHP developers to change one line of source code.

Seven years in IT is more than a century in overall human history! It is quite an era. If this would be a problem covering only a small group o people and if fixing it would require rebuilding half of the source code, then maybe I could agree and accept the fact, that such bug hasn't been fixed yet.

But, for the sake of God, this problem covers hundreds of thousands developers around the world, using PHP + Oracle combo with UTF encoding, and only one fucken line of code have to be changed to fix it!

So don't blame me, if I call PHP developers a complete losers, morons, lame idiots and and lazy asses!

I just can't find proper words to describe my feelings about this.

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