Extension 1.1 breaks CiviCRM System Status and causes other errors

[lsmithgo]

On my site (Joomla! 3.8.10, PHP 5.6.36, this extension 1.1, CiviCRM 5.3.2), this extension causes the following issues:

• clicking on the System Status link on any Civicrm back-end page doesn't work, it creates a blank page
• when loading Civicrm for the first time, site often creates Error 500
• messages in log: PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function civicrmVersion() in /blabla/www/media/civicrm/ext/com.cividesk.email.sparkpost/sparkpost.php on line 145

All these problems go away immediately the extension is disabled.

Upgrading to v1.2 is impossible due to the problems reported in Issue 62.

[mattwire]

Please use the extension from this commit: https://github.com/cividesk/com.cividesk.email.sparkpost/commit/b5b04fb02ef0e0b5f1959d8a379df272ce32ded7

Unfortunately the cURL changes in the latest release break the extension for a large number of sites.