Cacti eating brackets when importing templates

I am running cacti-0.8.7d on a Fedora 10 host
the php version we're using is

/usr/share/cacti/scripts $php -v PHP 5.2.6 (cli) (built: May 8 2008 10:23:54)
Copyright (c) 1997-2008 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2008 Zend Technologies

I've been trying to use several templates from different sources (MySQL templates, etc ...), and when importing any of them, cacti will eat brackets (properly specified as < and > in the XML template file).

Every Input Methods in the template end up being massacred:

<path_php_binary> -q <path_cacti>/scripts/ss_get_by_ssh.php --host <hostname> --type memcached --items bh,bi --server <server>

becomes

path_php_binary -q path_cacti/scripts/ss_get_by_ssh.php --host hostname --type memcached --items bh,bi --server server

which doesn't work when called by cacti, as it cannot even find the path to the script.

I've been looking into the cacti forum, and found some messages which seem related to that one, and some patches provided which don't apply to my version of cacti.

With the number of input methods i would have to change manually, I ended up doing nasty things such as direclty updating the cacti database to replace the parameter names with proper brackets, but sometimes the command line end up totally munged ...

Anyway, have you ever come across this problem with cacti ? did you find a proper way to fix it ? i'm suspecting that this could come from my version of PHP, and I found out that any kind of PHP code really hurts my eyes :-)

This is my 1st question on serverfault, so please be indulgent ...