Fixing Travis builds under PHP 5.4 due to change of htmlspecialchars + Re-enabling Transitions tests which was not executed

[ci skip]

Behaviour of pack/unpack changed in PHP 5.5 and caused Archive_Tar to break.

See: http://php.net/manual/en/migration55.changed-functions.php
and http://pear.php.net/bugs/bug.php?id=19746

[ci skip]

refs #1652

the test for core/IP.php fail. (getHostByAddress always returns the
first alias from /etc/hosts).

Reformatted code a bit.

refs #3252