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Spot on. He doesn't want to update his 50+ applications, but he wants to patch PHP and deal with the deployment of that to all the servers that support those 50+ applications. And he admits that he's not a C++ coder.

Sounds like a change management nightmare.

But it's only one change.+

+ Technically true. The scope will be equivalent to 50+ change tickets. And he'll be able to blame someone else for any issues that result.

Just goes to show that the issue had become personal, not technical. The complainer was bent on showing Rasmus that his code was wrong (by implementing the change himself), not on fixing the problem in the easiest way.

"Instead, he decides to modify the PHP source and recompile it, effectively forcing him to maintain a fork of PHP, as if somehow that magically takes less effort to develop and QA resources to maintain."

hehe, exactly the same sort of mentality that lead the person/team to somehow write code that end up depending on obscure parts of the api!