pass by value / reference

So I installed the latest ez_results package, on OSX, with PHP 4.3.11. I am using the register_function feature, to format some date information for display:

$ezr->register_function('format_comment_time');

But I am getting this in the php error log:

[Thu Feb 9 06:04:06 2006] [error] PHP Warning: Call-time pass-by-reference has been deprecated - argument passed by value; If you would like to pass it by reference, modify the declaration of format_comment_time(). If you would like to enable call-time pass-by-reference, you can set allow_call_time_pass_reference to true in your INI file. However, future versions may not support this any longer. in /docroot/ez_results.php(329) : eval()'d code on line 1

while I can enable allow_call_time_pass_reference on my development machine, I can't say the same for the production environment, plus I don't want to deploy something that is no longer supported by the PHP distributions.

What are my options?

thanks,
-d