Re: Splitting the subject: the PECL/PHP relationship

At 04:33 AM 2/4/2008, Derick Rethans wrote:

On Sun, 3 Feb 2008, Steph Fox wrote: Everything else - the fashionistas (JSON, xmlreader/writer) and the downright useful for some but not all (fileinfo, json, com_dotnet, posix) and the quirky stuff (pretty much anything Sara came up with) - should be in PECL. I see another issue after reading this, and that is that it makes it much harder for users to depend on specific extensions just being always available by default. It's important for application distributers to have this core set of extensions to rely on. It's annoying enough that some distributions (gentoo, freebsd) already use --disable-all and their users then bugging us (or me) with "you should check that SPL is enabled in your code".

        Just poking up my head to concur with Derick. What one person thinks of as 'fashionistas', another person will think of as absolutely core and necessary -- for example, I use xmlreader/writer in almost every piece of code I put out. If it were suddenly part of a PECL, a whole bunch of things I've written would break instantly. Yes, it's easy enough to work around, but backwards-compatibility will make for a happy PHP community.

--->Ben