gg2
PHP package with 20M installs deprecated
The gist
Jake A. Smith deprecated his 174-line PHP polyfill, which has 19,864,271 installs.
The tiny stopgap spread into WordPress, Debian and Ubuntu, so its retirement matters.
How it unfolded
- 2014Jake A. Smith wrote 174 lines of PHP as a stopgap for AOL's content management system during its upgrade from PHP 5.2 to 5.3, which dropped version 1 of the pecl_http extension and its http_build_url() function; he published it on Packagist.
- 2021By then out of PHP for a while, Smith asked for a new maintainer; three people offered, but he never followed up after an unexpected family loss.
- Sep 15, 2026Smith marked the package deprecated; Packagist statistics as of that date show 19,864,271 total installs and 401,308 in the last 30 days.