Re: cvs: php4 /ext/qtdom qtdom.c qtdom.h

At 10:32 AM 11/17/2000 -0800, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

On Thu, 16 Nov 2000, Sterling Hughes wrote: At 09:16 AM 11/16/2000 -0800, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

To me this is a little bit like saying we should only support one SQL database. Or one type of dbm. I don't think we should be making the call and forcing someone to pick one xml library over another. If enough people out there use qtdom I think we should support it.

Under your analogy I'd completely agree with you, however, I believe the analogy does not fit the current situation. The current situation is that we have two extensions meant to do *exactly* the same thing, parsing an xml document into a tree structure. With the database extensions they each do something different, they connect to different databases, providing different functionality, albeit they're all under the umbrella of a "database". A comparable analogy to the current situation would be if someone created another wddx extension that did basically the same thing as the current wddx extension, except it used libwddx and claimed to be less buggy than the current extension (and I'm not saying the current extension is buggy, its just an example, it has nothing to do with the actual wddx extension in PHP :). I don't think we should go ahead and support both extensions, one of the extensions should be chosen and that extension should be used and further developed The same is true here, both provide exactly the same functionality (parsing xml into a tree structure, actually to be accurate, the libxml extension supports more features), the only difference is that one is claiming to be less buggy than the other. I personally think that the qtdom extension would be a great candidate (and a valuable addition to the PHP community) for being distributed separately, but I don't think we should have two extensions doing exactly the same thing, providing exactly the same functionality. It isn't like wddx because wddx support does not require an external library. Because it relies on an external library it automatically falls closer to the SQL analogy than the WDDX analogy because there is always the chance that that particular library is used by some other Apache module. By not supporting this xml library we could be forcing people to link 2 different xml libraries into their httpd. -Rasmus

Ok, then lets move it over to the database end of things. The proposed extension would be like having two MySQL extensions installed with PHP because the MySQL client libraries have a bug in them. I do however see your point regarding the two different xml libraries and Apache, I hadn't considered that.... Ah well, I guess pear should solve all this (distributing both through pear would in my mind be the best possible solution, giving users the choice to download what they want/need). -Sterling