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Date: Wed, 12 May 2021 10:48:17 +0200
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To: Moritz Friedrich <m@9dev.de>
Cc: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Disable interactive mode (-a) if readline not available
From: nikita.ppv@gmail.com (Nikita Popov)

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On Wed, May 12, 2021 at 10:37 AM Moritz Friedrich <m@9dev.de> wrote:

>
> > Am 12.05.2021 um 10:12 schrieb Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com>:
> >
> > Hi internals,
> >
> > If the readline extension is enabled, PHP provides an interactive shell
> > under -a. If it is not enabled, it falls back to an "interactive mode"
> > (yes, the difference between "interactive shell" and "interactive mode"
> is
> > important here). The interactive mode is simply an stdin input, which
> needs
> > to be terminated using Ctrl+D. You can only run one script that way.
> >
> > I think the current behavior is quite confusing, because it's really no=
t
> > obvious that you ended up in this fallback mode (you need to know the
> > difference between "shell" and "mode" in the output) and most people
> > wouldn't know what to do with it. The latest instance of this is
> > https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=3D81033.
> >
> > I think we would be better off disabling -a completely if readline is n=
ot
> > available, and exit with a helpful error message. I've opened
> > https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/6976 to that effect. Does that soun=
d
> > reasonable?
> >
> > Regards,
> > Nikita
>
> Hi Nikita,
> if I may ask, would it also be possible to have deadline as a mandatory
> dependency to always have the interactive shell available? Is there a goo=
d
> reason to compile PHP without? Having a basic prompt available is really
> handy at times =E2=80=94 especially looking at Node.js with their ahead-c=
ompletion
> and general UX.
> The same has been done for other PHP modules in the past, so I wonder if
> we could simply have readline as a guarantee.


The readline extension has an external dependency on readline / libedit.
Making it a required extension would also make this a required dependency.
We avoid having dependencies for the minimal build. The only dependency we
currently have is libpcre, and we vendor that one. I doubt we'll want to
add a new vendored dependency, as they tend to be a major pain.

I personally do not use the interactive shell (and I think most people who
do use *an* interactive shell prefer psysh), so I don't think this can be
reasonably considered a "required" feature.

Regards,
Nikita

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