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Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2018 22:20:56 +0200
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To: Stanislav Malyshev <smalyshev@gmail.com>
Cc: PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] [VOTE] Cleaning up unmaintained extensions
From: nikita.ppv@gmail.com (Nikita Popov)

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On Sun, Jun 17, 2018 at 9:43 PM, Stanislav Malyshev <smalyshev@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi!
>
> I would like to open the vote for the RFC about cleaning up the
> unmaintained extensions:
>
> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/umaintained_extensions
>
> The vote ends 2018-06-26 23:59 PDT.
>
> I have added some discussion about active maintainers and abandonment
> procedures, this can be refined further later. I also kept the list of
> the candidates as-is for now, but I will update it soon and probably
> make a separate wiki page for maintaining it. Please note this list is
> not part of the vote (the vote is on the process, not specific list
> which will change all the time).
>

I really don't like this.

There are two extensions that I'm aware of where we have strong technical
grounds to remove them, that's wddx (for reasons of security and
questionable utility) and interbase (has a major bug since the PHP 7
migration and there is nobody with knowledge of this exotic DB driver to
fix it).

If we have technical grounds for a removal and nobody is willing to step up
to resolve the issues, then I'm all for moving extensions to PECL. If this
is not the case, then I feel that removing them will not make the situation
any better (especially seeing relatively common extensions like gettext,
readline and ftp on that list). Extensions without official maintainer in
php-src tend to be passively maintained, e.g. I remember merging various
PRs to the ftp extension over the last few years (and of course, small
extensions like gettext just don't get many changes over time). Moving an
extension to PECL effectively makes it completely unmaintained.

To me, moving extensions to PECL is a Pretty Big Deal. It's something that
should be done on a case-by-case basis, possibly with an RFC, not something
that happens based on a blanket policy.

Regards.
Nikita

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