Re: zend module patch

At 19:23 10-10-01, Sascha Schumann wrote:

On Wed, 10 Oct 2001, Zeev Suraski wrote: I'm in favour of having this in 4.0.7, and releasing 4.0.7. The main reasoning being that we already break lots of APIs with 4.0.7, we might as well move this in now as well.

    We do not need to break the API as I described earlier.  If
    done correctly, we do not need to bother extension developers
    again.

We already broke the API numerous times in 4.0.7. The thing we didn't break is the narrow binary compatibility of the module_entry structure.

    I'm fine with introducing this in a later version, but this
    is clearly no 4.0.7 material from my perspective (I refer you
    to our track-record of including late changes into releases).

    I'm convinced that we can work together to add the new module
    structure to the HEAD branch and make this transparently
    work for all existing extensions.

I understand your point, but I arrive at a different conclusion. I don't think that doing this without breaking compatibility is feasible, even though it may be technically feasible, and I come to that conclusion by looking at the same track record of our last two years... I'll be happy if you prove me wrong, but because I'm not convinced that you (or anybody else) will, I'd rather wait with 4.0.7 until we get this settled, whether it's with a compatibility breaking change or not. If we end up having to break compatibility, we should do it now. Also, as far as I can tell, the glue code we'll have to add in order to introduce this change in a downwards compatible way will be pretty messy, and it may be better to break compatibility in a hard way. In my opinion, we should incorporate the changes in the next release of PHP. We can perhaps restart the whole 4.0.7 release process, or just force a couple of more RC's. Andi even suggested the possibility of skipping 4.0.7 and going directly to 4.0.8, but that's mostly semantics...

    Btw, are there any resources which describe what kind of
    API changes were introduced between 4.0.6 and 4.0.7?  IMHO we
    should provide extension developers with any material which
    is necessary to ease the pain of migrating to the latest
    API.

Not to the best of my knowledge, no. As always, the only real documentation is the source and php-dev. Zeev