Re: Are PECL modules preferable?

Just as a follow up where I just asked Greg Anderson of Pantheon on their community Slack in the #community channel about supporting new versions of PHP and ability to install PECL extensions. It pretty much follows exactly what I have been saying: ===================== Greg Anderson [Pantheon]: ===================== In terms of upgrading PHP, it's a mixed bag. Some hosts are slow, some are fast. Pantheon is pretty quick about updating patch releases. Minor releases, though, are usually not prioritized right away because it is assumed that most customers won't want to upgrade to the latest patch release until Drupal / WordPress supports it. There's also the question of how much work it is to upgrade. 7.0, 7.2, and 7.4 required some fixing. 7.1 and 7.3 pretty much worked out of the box. In instanced where there's very little work to be done, we usually can slip it onto the platform right away. If it takes some time, then the card goes to product, and product prioritizes it against all of our other features. ------- Regarding PECL, no, you cannot add any compiled extensions on Pantheon. You have to use what we package; you can see what's available from this php-info link: https://v74-php-info.pantheonsite.io/ If a lot of customers request an extension, then Product might go ahead and give us a card to add it to the platform. It's not much work to add an extension, but there's a maintenance cost, so really not very many of these get added (beyond the base set already identified) ------- Sure, you can buy a nice Digital Ocean container and put whatever you want on it. Our customers want something different, though, so there's a trade-off. Maybe if PHP came with a "bundled" distro with a base set of PECL extensions tested and added, managed hosts would decide to pick that up. ===================== -Mike P.S. Pantheon is an enterprise-level WordPress host that my company has been using and recommending since 2014 because of how much of the pain they handle that is associated with hosting a secure and performance WordPress server that uses Git directly for version control and provides a test-stage-live environment for every "site."