Re: Re: cvs: php4 / TODO-4.1.txt

At 09:24 PM 4/18/2001 -0700, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

At 09:16 PM 4/18/2001 -0700, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

When we're past the prototyping phase and stuff stabilizes, a C rewrite may be a good idea, but I don't think it is now.

Well you know the most permanent things are temporary things such as prototypes. I also thought it would make much more sense to create something

very small

in C (maybe even Perl as it's installed on all systems) and use that. I'm not really sure anymore what this installer you are talking

about looks

like. So I think it would be good to get a small update and have a discussion of what we need on php-dev@.

I see no issue with writing a prototype in PHP. The start of such a prototype is in cvs (pear/script/pear) And yes, using XML is pretty much a no-brainer here. That will allow a lot of different nifty tools to access the package information.

For a start you don't have PHP installed on most systems. So PHP would need to compile itself and then fetch packages and recompile itself. Seems to me like the no-brainer isn't such a no-brainer. We need to somehow work out the functionality. Once it is well-defined other clients will come, I am sure. We can always provide a small statically linked installer program which includes a stripped down PHP binary and the appropriate Installer class.

Right but if we chose XML this makes it much harder to have C clients (even Perl because the module might not be installed). I don't think it will be such a complicated format for us to need XML here especially as it limits what clients will be created. I think it needs more thought. Having a prototype for the functionality is OK but not if you're talking about a prototype which sets the standard.

If we were to write it in C we would most likely need to provide a statically linked binary anyway for the different platforms as not everyone will have access to a fully functioning development environment.

If they are compiling PHP and PHP extensions we can expect them to be able to compile an ANSI C program.

Despite the pervasiveness of Perl, chances are high that certain Perl modules would be missing and then someone has to go looking for Perl modules to install PHP packages.. Ouch!

You can do this kind of stuff with the Vanilla Perl and don't need extensions. Andi