Re: [RFC] Deprecations for PHP 8.5

On Friday, 4 July 2025 at 22:52, Peter Kokot <petk@php.net> wrote: > I'd also suggest deprecating building ext/readline with the Readline library and > ext/dba with the GDBM library. > > These two libraries are released under the GPL-3 license, which is not > compatible with PHP. In practice this means that PHP linked with GPL-3-licensed > software should not be distributed, making it impractical for any server > environment beyond a local testing project. This issue isn't immediately > obvious, but many packagers need to be aware of it and avoid building with these > libraries. > > ext/readline works fine with the Editline library as an alternative, > ext/dba works fine with other handlers. > > This suggestion would otherwise delay resolving the issue, as it would require > an RFC vote - something I hoped to avoid in pull requests. But I suppose that's > how it has to be handled. > > See also: > - https://github.com/php/php-src/issues/15882 > - https://github.com/php/php-src/issues/16826 > - https://www.php.net/license/contrib-guidelines-code.php Feel free to add a section to the RFC! :) If we are going to deprecate some DBA libraries I would also chuck in some of the old DBA versions that we can't test in CI as they don't seem to be provided anywhere. Best regards, Gina P. Banyard