The package works fine under F26 (and could be pushed to stable), but the referenced bug is the wrong one (should be #1423523 and #1417329).

Unfortunately, the automatic replacing misses three spots where "bsdtar" is meant:

1. In the manual title, "TAR(1)" (".Dt TAR 1").
2. In a command example, "$ tar -cvf output.tar @input.mtree" (".Dl $ tar -cvf output.tar @input.mtree").
3. In the section "Compatibility", "For maximum portability, scripts that invoke tar should use the bundled-argument format above, […]".

I looked at all other matches of "\b(bsd)?tar\b" and they appeared correct to me.

This works at least for font-locking (I didn't check deeper as I typically use php-mode primarily for syntax highlighting). Thanks!

The package doesn't associate php-mode automatically with *.php files. I'm not sure if and what the official Fedora policy for this is, but the puppet package's puppet-mode-init.el has a:

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.pp\\'" . puppet-mode))

I would find it useful to have the same for php-mode.