obsolete set of tools (autoconf-2.13, etc.). Having Phar in the main
distro will open up a whole new way to distribute PHP applications which
would be a great advantage. The current system of distributing a bunch
of PHP files has some shortcomings.
I'm personally not sure phar is that great way of distributing apps - it's yet another format not supported by standard tools and I don't really see much of an advantage to using it versus just making a package with any of the existing package formats and I see a number of disadvantages - non-standard format, hard to work with packed scripts with available filesystem tools, etc. But that's my opinion and I fully expect some people to hold exactly the opposite opinion. The question is however is phar so important that everybody needs it in the main source?
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Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Products Engineer
stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/