SQLite3, PDO/SQLite and driver specific methods

Hi list, 4 months ago there was a discussion about the future of SQLite3 and PDO/SQLite extensions (https://externals.io/message/108256), highlighting the effort required to maintain two codebases. Recently I encountered https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=64810 and thence https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/3368. In the pull request Christoph M. Becker wrote on 8 May: This PR is still unresolved. The problem is that adding driver specific > methods to PDO via the currently existing mechanism (basicall > __call > like), has faced some strong oposition, so this should be discussed on > internals. It probably would make sense to start some general discussion > about this issue, and to hopefully come to a solution, so driver specific > functionality could be added to PDO in the future. > [Link: https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/3368#issuecomment-625731098] In light of this comment, I'm emailing the list to start a general discussion about this issue. As alluded to earlier, there is a maintenance burden, and for users the lack of parity between the two extensions can be an issue. PDO is well established as providing a standardised access layer across databases. SQLite requires extensions to be loaded to gain feature parity with other databases (e.g. to load geospatial functions) and since it is not a database server these have to be loaded at runtime. PDO has three sqlite-prefixed functions (https://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.pdo-sqlite.php) but not one to load extensions. Is it a problem to add one? If it is, how can we change and improve the current situation? Peter