Re: mbstring and 4.3.0

Jani Taskinen wrote:

Oh, I forgot: How many bug reports have we got so far for that fuckup with 4.2.3 ??? I _REALLY_ don't want to see another wave of those for 4.3.0..

Do you mean array input handling bug? It's not mbstring developers' fault. -- Yasuo Ohgaki

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