Third party libraries in Joomla

[Septdir]

I conducted a small investigation and found the following: in com_finder, the library wamania/php-stemmer is used, which in turn uses the library voku/portable-utf8, which uses the library voku/portable-ascii.

Moreover, wamania/php-stemmer supports only some languages, namely Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

Furthermore, the code of the wamania/php-stemmer library has not been updated for 3 years, and aside from dependency corrections, no other changes have been made. Issues requesting language support have also been unaddressed for 2 years.

It's also worth noting that the library that started it all, voku/portable-utf8, has already once led to a release block for Joomla 4.3.

As a result, we find that a feature in one component, that is available to only 14 out of 70 languages supported by Joomla relies on 3 third-party libraries.

I think that such use of third-party libraries is not rational, increasing the load on the security team and the risks of vulnerabilities.
Therefore, I suggest checking the use of libraries in components and reducing their use where possible.