RE: [PHP-DEV] mbstring

Wez, lets loose the crap here. I am happy to see mbstring in PHP! I have used it too, when I needed multibyte support. But you see, it's not really all that solid. It needs more work (hence this apparent development outside of php.net). All I am saying is that we should disable it by default in current releases. For PHP5, we should have proper mbstring support that should probably also be transparent; by that I mean I see no reason for it not to be as standard functionality rather than an extension, if that is necessary. I will let Phil know that he can update his errata to just removing the one compile option -- however, he demonstrates a valid point: unexpected behaviour sucks. This includes the building of modules that you don't need. if it were me, i'd rather just be able to build the bare-bones PHP binary without an extensions, and compile others in as i needed them. By enabling extensions by default, what you end up doing is increasing the size of the end product... now that, in most cases, doesn't make a difference, however for scenarios where you have very little space to play with... having extensions compiled in by default that you don't know about sucks. if we want to do some kind of auto-compile thing, then perhaps a script which detects-and-compiles every extension could get stuck in /php4 for those who were really lazy. As I see it, PHP was designed with speed and simplicity in mind. Having the burden of a large number of extra modules compiled in by default doesn't help, and deviates from this path. Compiling modules by default which are buggy just compounds the problem.