Re: Could some kind soul review these patches please.

On Wed, 13 Dec 2000, Zeev Suraski wrote: > Personally, I'm not particularly in favour of moving extensions out of PHP, > unless they're *REALLY* rarely used. I think that one of the good things > about PHP, and one thing I hated in Perl, is that everything is in > it. CPAN is impressive, no doubt, but I hated to have to search a zillion > packages in CPAN just to get a script to run. > > I think the question we should be asking ourselves, always, is what the > gain is. If we can come up with good reasons, then we should stay with the > way it is, because it works. > > I fail to see the advantage of moving extension source to PEAR. I'd like to see PEAR move in this direction. The benefits of having PHP include all extensions are definitely strong ones. However, as more extensions are added which apply to less users, PHP will inevitably grow larger than is justified by the benefits. Sure, as somebody with no worries regarding disk or cpu space, or bandwidth, I would probably prefer to grab everything in one tarball and build it all from there. But I think the time will come when this becomes impractical for users. In any case, available resources isn't the only consideration. It would be beneficial to have an authoritative and automated mechanism for installing extensions on a system without recompiling PHP itself. It seems to me that this would go a long way in fostering the development of more extensions to PHP, assuming this is a direction that interests the PHP group. If such a system was in place, I think it would be good to pear down (So to speak) the number of extensions included in PHP. Some candidates I would consider, for various reasons, as 'non-core' are ccvs, cybercash, dotnet, fribidi, iisfunc, ircg, printer, and qtdom. Mainly I'm thinking about which extensions have relatively limited audiences, either due to an extension's purpose or portability. For example, one of the key reasons I opted against submitting php_imlib for inclusion into PHP is that it can't be used on non-Unix platforms. Still, there are exceptions to everything, so portability can't be the only criteria. Matt