Re: Could some kind soul review these patches please.

At 01:04 14/12/2000, Matt McClanahan wrote:

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.

I really don't think that these are real world issues. Disk space is dirt cheap today. And so is bandwidth, when we're talking about the range of hundreds of kilobytes, or a couple of megabytes at most. Including all extensions in the PHP source tree does not waste any CPU time - Sascha's latest and greatest build only includes the modules that are actually being compiled-in in the PHP binary. I really fail to see a real-world reason to stop distributing any remotely-popular extension along with PHP. Fact is, for someone who's used to install PHP and the modules he likes by simply turning them on in configure (and I think there's a huge number of such people), we'll be doing a disservice by moving the modules away to a separate mechanism.

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.

Well, most of them are indeed non core. Some are probably more popular than others (cybercash, for instance). Again, I fail to see the gain of moving them away. This, by the way, has nothing to do with your suggestion for an automated mechanism for building extensions, which is a good idea. Zeev -- Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> CTO, Zend Technologies Ltd. http://www.zend.com/