Re: Are PECL modules preferable?

On Mon, Mar 23, 2020, at 3:08 PM, Mike Schinkel wrote: > 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. > ===================== Platform.sh, the managed host I work for, has offered every version of PHP since 7.1 day-of-release, and we also have a long list of available PECL extensions that can be enabled by adding a line to a YAML file. We also have a built-in build pipline where you can download and compile/install most other extensions as desired. We're also a Git-based host with every Git branch able to be a running environment. It's not that managed hosts can't make new-stuff easily available. It's that many don't. But enough do that if you need the latest-and-greatest, you have plenty of options. --Larry Garfield