It might not be an easy fix if you're not familiar with PHP's guts. It's the kind of fix that can induce a lot of unexpected regressions.
Not wanting to fix a bug because it's not worth the time or risks breaking backward compatibility is perfectly fine by me. But at least take a decision and say something.
If they don't plan on fixing it they should say something like "We believe this is a minor bug that only concerns a small number of users. In order to fix this we'd need to change X, Y and Z and make sure we don't introduce regressions. If you want to try and do it we'll be glad to review your patches. In the meantime you can use this workaround: [...]".
I hate it when I submit a bug report and it's being ignored. You also build a strawman argument with the "lot of open source software that you wanted to use for free". It's a bug and should be fixed (even if the fix is closing the ticket as "wontfix").
specifically the complaint that this problem manifests with lots of off-the-shelf software (although I suppose he didn't specify FOSS in his original comment).
However, I wasn't directly responding to that guy, I was more responding to what I feel has been aptly described as a "witch hunt" by others on this page.
It might not be an easy fix if you're not familiar with PHP's guts
10 years is a long time for someone to have the chance to get familiar with it.
Even if you assume that for 8 years, everyone was saying "oh, it will get fixed some time" even 2 years is a long time for anyone affected by this problem seriously enough to become familiar enough with PHP to fix the problem if that's the path that will produce the most value for them (ie. if there's enough value in some existing codebase or off the shelf software to warrant fixing this if there's truly no other workaround).
Still, I can see the sense in promoting major issues like this with PHP, but posting the bug report on the front page of HN is far less useful than, say, writing a blog post about it with some case studies of where the problem has been manifest, how people have dealt with it, the history of the bug, etc.
Actually that's a good blog post, might put it on my list ;)
Not wanting to fix a bug because it's not worth the time or risks breaking backward compatibility is perfectly fine by me. But at least take a decision and say something.
If they don't plan on fixing it they should say something like "We believe this is a minor bug that only concerns a small number of users. In order to fix this we'd need to change X, Y and Z and make sure we don't introduce regressions. If you want to try and do it we'll be glad to review your patches. In the meantime you can use this workaround: [...]".
I hate it when I submit a bug report and it's being ignored. You also build a strawman argument with the "lot of open source software that you wanted to use for free". It's a bug and should be fixed (even if the fix is closing the ticket as "wontfix").