Re: the dl() issue

At 12:25 11/03/2002 -0800, Shane Caraveo wrote:

At 11:42 11/03/2002 +0200, Marko Karppinen wrote:

Shane wrote:

I think dl is an extremely important feature, and issues surrounding

it

should be fixed.

I'm absolutely, positively +1 on this. On the Mac OS X side of things, we are in the interesting situation of

Apple should be using php.ini for extensions and not require the user to call dl() wich is sucky. I still am not quite sure why it's such a big deal to add shared extensions to php.ini. I don't agree that PHP extensions necessarily require dl(). There are many programs out there in the computer industry (such as Apache) which require you to add extensions in an INI file. I don't see this as an Apple issue at all, though from the comments I guess it could fix an issue for that platform as well. The issue to me is a matter of usability. I want to have a single installation of PHP, but may have many different situations under which I use that installation. Perhaps one application uses modules x, y and z extensively, another uses a, b and c extensively, and perhaps d very rarely. Lets say neither uses extensions the other app uses. The current situation is that I must load all extensions in php.ini irregardless of use, or I must use -c to specify an ini file, etc. I prefer not to load extensions unless I really need them, but PHP simply does not provide an easy effective means to do that. Perl and Python both do and you never have to think about messing with an ini file. I think far PHP has put far too much reliance on the ini file.

I don't know many production installations where all extensions wouldn't be dl()'ed within a few seconds even if there are what you call *rarely* used scripts. I think your examples are theoretical and the ini change can be done quite easily even by a dumb automatic installation script. In any case, I still think a solution can be found I just don't have any concrete ideas on how to fix it. By the way, you mentioned perl as an example. I have no idea how perl works in multi-threaded environments but if you say it works very nicely with perl & multi-threaded servers then I take your word for it. Andi