Re: mbstring and 4.3.0

At 04:11 13.11.2002, Jani Taskinen wrote:

    Since when have we started to use users as guinea-pigs
    for testing EXPERIMENTAL extensions without them even
    really knowing about it?!!

mbstring is not EXPERIMENTAL and i said let them try it. That does not mean test it. We think it works .

    You can't FORCE anybody to use it. 99% of apps out there
    DO NO NEED IT..get it?? (they've managed without it very long time..)

    --Jani

Yes they lived without correct display of characters because there was no solution. For example i would like to send german umlauts even when someone has another charset installation on his machine. With mbstring this is easy.

On Wed, 13 Nov 2002, Marcus Börger wrote: At 23:56 12.11.2002, Ilia A. wrote:

Since I've gotten involved in this conversation would like to add my

opinion

to the tally. I too believe that at least at this point, the mbstring extension should not be enabled by default. There are two reasons for this decision: 1) Majority of PHP users do not require this functionality. Most PHP

programs

are developed with non-multibyte languages in mind and mbstring only adds unnecessary overhead. People who need it can easily enable it or ask their ISPs to enable it, if they had done so already.

NO. Most people do not have the choice and ISPs usually take the default. If the default is not approriate they do not use it. If you read the whole thread you find enough reasons how apps benefit from mbstring and what could be easily achieved with languages like german.

2) mbstring extension is a fairly complex piece of code and iirc is the youngest extension of this magnitude that is enabled by default.

Although the

extension developers are very prompt at fixing bugs, the fact they need

to do

this fairly frequently, at least to me, implies that the extension is

not yet

mature enough to be enabled by default. Also, judging by the number of changes in the CVS to the extension, a lot of new functionality was

added to

the extension recently and has not been tested outside the pre process.

Maybe

by next PHP release is made, it will be better tested and more stable. Ilia

Ok there are some problems and that is the backside of it: Some of us implement new functionality and some merge code from the original development tree. In other words: Maybe we should slow down or even stop feature development until 4.3 is out.... After php 4.3 we hope the new implementation can be used. As long as function overloading isn't used there is no harm from mbstring (disable is the default). And some extra bytes shouldn't affect anybody today. If you say most apps are not designed to use mbstring then it's nice that all those could try mbstring which would like to. So we can get feedback. As long as it isn't default there will be none or only little feedback. The stability is very high and we have many *.phpt tests to help us find failures and make it even more stable. marcus -- <- For Sale! ->