My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it
a day ago
- A 174-line PHP polyfill written in 2014 as a temporary fix for AOL's CMS has accumulated nearly 20 million installations worldwide.
- The polyfill replicates the deprecated http_build_url() function and is bundled in WPML, idna-convert, SPIP, and Debian/Ubuntu packages.
- A known bug in the code incorrectly strips the letter 'a' from paths when appending a trailing slash.
- The author has decided to deprecate the package rather than transfer maintenance, citing security risks and recommending alternatives like the PHP League's URI library or PHP 8.5's built-in URI API.