A temporary PHP fix turns 12 and retires after nearly 20 million installs
In 2014, Jake A. Smith wrote a 174-line PHP compatibility fix as a stopgap for AOL’s CMS. Twelve years and nearly 20 million cumulative Packagist installs later, he has deprecated it. The package remains installable, but it will receive no new fixes. “Temporary” has officially entered its retirement era.
The actual story.
Smith created the http_build_url polyfill while upgrading AOL’s CMS from PHP 5.2 to PHP 5.3 and dropping an older extension. The small replacement outlived the migration it was meant to support. In his September 15 post, Smith reported 19,864,271 total Packagist installs and explained why he is ending maintenance. Those installs are cumulative package downloads, not a count of unique developers or websites. Deprecation does not remove the package: existing projects can still install it, but should not expect new fixes. Smith points developers toward PHP League’s URI tools and PHP 8.5’s native URI API. The meme borrows Titanic’s elderly Rose reaction to capture a familiar software experience: the stopgap that stays long enough to become infrastructure.
Temporary code can become a long-term dependency. This package is still available; its maintenance has ended.
Receipts, not rumors.
Read the original reporting: Jake A. Smith ↗
The reporting above provides context. The meme is satire. The copy and illustration were created with AI session tools from the linked source.
Got a better punchline?