Re: What to do with ext/snmp?

On Fri, Aug 30, 2024, at 9:54 AM, Calvin Buckley wrote: > On Aug 29, 2024, at 2:49 PM, Christoph M. Becker <cmbecker69@gmx.de> wrote: >> >> Hi all, >> >> it seems to me that we're pulling through ext/snmp without having any >> real expert of the protocol, let alone of the implementation. The >> extension has no code owner, and according to EXTENSIONS, it has no >> primary maintainer for more than ten years. Skimming through the commit >> log mostly shows general clean-ups and changes. And seeing that there >> have only two issues been reported on Github[1], I would conclude that >> either the extension just works as expected, or that it is not used >> much. A recent doc-bug report[2] makes me believe it's the latter. >> >> Personally, I barely know what SNMP is used for, but have no deeper >> understanding of that protocol, and I can remember that it took me quite >> a while to work out how to even set up a testing environment on Windows >> (without understanding the details). >> >> So the question is: do we have any SNMP experts (or some who want to >> become SNMP experts) around, who would want to take a look at the >> extension and its documentation? >> >> [1] >> >> <https://github.com/php/php-src/issues?q=is%3Aissue+label%3A%22Extension%3A+snmp%22+is%3Aopen> >> [2] <https://github.com/php/doc-en/issues/3690> >> >> Christoph > > I suspect it's not in high use either; Michael's reply suggests that. > Maybe it could be spun out to PECL if there's a lack of interest in it, > like imap was? That probably makes the most sense. > (stupid speculation follows, people who know the history correct me) > > There are a few other extensions like that in ext/. I'm thinking a lot > of them would have been in PECL or done in userland, but they were at > the right place in the right time and ended up in ext/ instead. They > might predate PECL (seems to be the case for SNMP), or wrapped a library > hat was mature and well-used when it was written (seemed to the case for > imap). Yes, ext/snmp probably goes back as far as the PHP 3 days (some guy named Rasmus was the original author). Perhaps if the effort from the PHP Foundation to build a next-generation PECL bears fruit, an even harder look can be taken at migrating out even more of the extensions still living in the php-src tree. With some robust CI, care could be made to make sure changes in php-src that impact extensions is noticed and dealt with, but spinning them out on their own might make them easier for more people to contribute to and maintain. Jim