Re: [RFC] Deprecate PEAR/PECL & Replace with composer/pickle

> On 5 Sep 2016, at 11:19, Stanislav Malyshev <smalyshev@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi! > >> I'd like to introduce a new RFC to deprecate pear/pecl (in 7.2, and remove > > What would be achieved by this? I'm not sure about status of PEAR - > frankly, didn't touch it for a long time - but if composer replaces most > of it, it may be ok to remove by-default install of pear tools. Though > I'm really not sure what "deprecating" means and what it's going to > achieve. > > Pickle main README says: > > Pickle is a new PHP extension installer. It is based on Composer and the > plan is to get Composer to fully support it. > > How is that plan going? I see the pull req it refers to still open, > which means it is still not complete. Should it be completed before we > recommend it as an only solution? > >> in 8.0), as well as add composer/pickle (optional in 7.2, default in 7.3+) >> in their place. > > Add in which meaning? Distribute composer package with PHP source? > Wouldn't that add maintenance load to keep it up-to-date? > > If that means get some way to d/l newest stable composer, e.g. when > installing php, that probably would be a great idea. Does not require > removing stuff though. > > > -- > Stas Malyshev > smalyshev@gmail.com > > -- > PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > I think there is value in reducing the number of ‘bundled’ things, particularly given that Debian (and thus Ubuntu), Centos and OS X all distribute PEAR/PECL as a separate package. On the Linux distro's it’s a separate (but possibly “recommended” by php-cli etc) package. On OSX there is /usr/lib/install-pear-nozlib.phar. Unbundling from PHP itself then makes perfect sense to me - it’s effectively mirroring how PHP is actually distributed for a great number of environments already. However, I find the concept of then adding in Composer/Pickle to be a very odd choice, and a poor one “politically”. As someone else said, bundling composer sounds like an official endorsement of PHP-FIG, which I suspect a number of people would have issues with. On a purely technical level - it makes little sense. As demonstrated above, a decent number of environments are not going to ship it as an included tool anyway.