I suspect this bug might somehow be related to libedit, which was (re)introduced into php5-cli in Hardy.
I downloaded the source packages of php on Hardy as well as on Jaunty, removed "--with-libedit" from debian/rules and rebuilt the packages. When I had installed the new binaries "php -i | less" worked just the way you would expect it to.
I suspect this bug might somehow be related to libedit, which was (re)introduced into php5-cli in Hardy.
I downloaded the source packages of php on Hardy as well as on Jaunty, removed "--with-libedit" from debian/rules and rebuilt the packages. When I had installed the new binaries "php -i | less" worked just the way you would expect it to.