An important PHP security developer retires, with some rather harsh words on the project and PHP security.

While I agree that PHP by itself isn't really insecure (actual security bugs excluded), the one thing I really blame PHP for is that it does not assist the developer at all in writing secure applications. On contrary, give a novice PHP developer some non-trivial task involving a database and some extra files and you'll have at least two security issues.

I stopped using PHP some years ago for a few reasons, including above "security issues by default" (which IMHO are due to a badly designed language) and because PHP is heavily encouraging the user to mix design and application (which is a pain from a maintainance point of view). Of course you could do model-view-controller in PHP, but it doesn't make it easy to do so (another thing why I consider the language to be badly designed). And don't get me started on "register_globals"...

OTOH, some years ago I maintained a PHP extension, ming, which has recently found it's way back into Debian. Back then, I had the impression that PHP itself is also a pain to package. Building an extension worked okay, but it seemed as if getting PHP to build and work reliably on all architectures with all extensions is a pain. (That maybe is why the php packages have many open bugs; and why it took e.g. four years to add packages for the pspell extension)

It's out - and barely missed the etch freeze, so we'll still ship the previous version. But the 1.00 version is sitting in the Debian NEW queue (I moved the manual to it's own package, so this needs ftp-master intervention); a recent beta is already in unstable for you to begin playing.

Enigma is a game with a great mixture of mouse skill and puzzle elements. Some levels rely on precise mouse movements, others on speed, and others are pure puzzle levels. And of course everything inbetween. Sometimes you have to use items in a clever way, sometimes control several marbles at once, or switch control between two marbles as needed (some of these levels will be playable in a multiplayer mode sometime). It's the smooth mouse control (which varies from floor type, too bad we don't have force feedback...) and this unique mixture that makes it so great.

If you've ever played Oxyd on Atari ST or Mac (later versions were also available on MS DOS) - then you'll definitely want to get enigma - it's a clone of that classic, and it can load levels from your Oxyd data files, if you want to play the original levels.