Re: [RFC] Starting 5.3

On 05/08/2007 12:36 PM, Marcus Boerger wrote:

The point is to make local URL wrappers working, not only phar://. Stanislav and Tony have a point, writing a custom extension to fix a problem that we introduced is a bad idea and does not solve the problem for anyone else but phar. If phar will be bundled or not does not matter, this problem has to be solved anyway.

Right Pierre, as you said, this is a different thing that might have to be addressed anyway. However phar is a real life thing that needs to be working. Besides, Phar is neither a custom extension - at least i do not see either Greg or me as PHP customers. Nor was Phar designed to solve that particular issue alone. It was designed to deliver a stable and fast implementation of PHP_Archive that can be bundled into PHP as a C extension.

But the main argument for including it that it's going to solve the newly created problem. I.e. PEAR and all the other phar packages work perfectly fine without it.

Guys what I don't understand is why some few people bicker around Phar so much, just because they have no private use for it?

If you're talking about me, then you should know that I'm not against Phar/Greg/you or PEAR. I'm against including new PECL stuff in the core and I've repeated that several times already. Things should go the other way round - from the core to PECL.

In the past we have bundeled even stuff that has not been stable or in a mature state.

Well, THAT is a nice argument. We've fucked it up in the past, let's do it again, huh?

And I have not seen a single reason against it.

I have not seen a single reason FOR it either. The only half-valid reason is that phars will stop working in PHP6 because of the streams breakage. But that's definitely the reason to fix streams, otherwise we'll have to include each & every extension using custom streams.

Now adding Pecl/Zip was a clever idea as it allows an easy way to compress stuff on the fly for sites that offer downloads. However this is a) far far away from a mainstream problem and b) we should not eventhink of turning it into a JAR and hack around PHP all over. Let's just go with Zip/BZip2/GZ (a sane offer of choices) for on the fly packing and Phar for deployment. And if some people want to execute phars directly, then why the hell make it hard for them or even disallow that?

-- Wbr, Antony Dovgal