I'm sure that there are good reasons for the new memory corruption warnings that appear in PHP 4.4 and 5.0.5. However the PHP engine developers have done an extremely bad job in explaining why many things that worked in earlier versions of PHP now breaks, or why we are now getting "Fatal error/Warning: Only variables can be passed by reference..." messages.

This sort of confusion leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and is not helped by remarks such as "Feel free to fix the whole engine though with a patch...", "There's nothing critical here, fix your scripts". If we understood better why the engine couldn't be fixed perhaps we would feel better and more cooperative instead of feeling stupid, confused and annoyed -- because it really isn't an end-user bug, but a PHP internals one that has surfaced and bitten everyone.

Thx to thepimp for sparking this rant.

Update 15 Sept: There are PHP internals developers looking into this.