Proposal to unbundle imap/pspell/oci8 extensions for PHP 8.4

Hi, In a recent chat between the PHP Foundation developers, we discussed unbundling several extensions. ext/imap The library that provides the functionality in this extension, c-client, is no longer updated. The last release from 2007 is no longer available on the original distributor's (University of Washington) website, but there is an unofficial GitHub repository that hasn't been updated for 5 years either (https://github.com/uw-imap/imap). You can't also use this any more with G Suite due to authentication changes (https://github.com/uw-imap/imap/issues/4). There are several user-land packages that are still maintained, and provide superior functionality: - https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer - https://github.com/zetacomponents/Mail/ - https://github.com/symfony/mailer - https://github.com/laminas/laminas-mail ext/pspell The original underlying library hasn't been updated since 2001 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pspell) and it's replacement, aspell not since 2019 (https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/). There are other replacements, ispell, and hunspell, but they don't seem to be compatible API-wise. The PECL extension "enchant" was supposed to be able to use with all of these, but is also no longer maintained (last release in 2009, https://pecl.php.net/package/enchant). Again, there are several user land composer packages (https://packagist.org/?query=spell) that can be used instead. ext/oci8 Requires a proprietary library from large commercial enterprise (https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/instant-client.html) and has many outstanding bugs: https://bugs.php.net/search.php?cmd=display&package_name[]=PDO+OCI&package_name[]=OCI8+related&package_name[]=Oracle+related&order_by=ts1&direction=ASC&limit=30&status=Open&reorder_by=ts1 https://github.com/php/php-src/labels/Extension%3A%20oci8 Most of the recent changes were all to skip tests. It is also one of the larger extensions left that had not had their resource type converted to objects. This is a major effort, and frankly, probably something that should be done by the corporate sponsor of the oracle extensions. Please remember, that unbundling extensions does not mean that they disappear. They will be moved to PECL with a release made. An RFC will of course be forthcoming, but we thought it best to email the list first. cheers, Derick -- https://derickrethans.nl | https://xdebug.org | https://dram.io Author of Xdebug. Like it? Consider supporting me: https://xdebug.org/support Host of PHP Internals News: https://phpinternals.news mastodon: @derickr@phpc.social @xdebug@phpc.social twitter: @derickr and @xdebug