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Date: Sun, 6 Jun 2021 15:25:49 +0200
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Subject: PHP 8.1 and PECL ext builds for Windows
From: cmbecker69@gmx.de ("Christoph M. Becker")

Hi all,

on Tuesday, PHP 8.1.0alpha1 is supposed to be tagged, and since I don't
have the capacity to do these builds manually (as currently done with
the PHP 8.0 builds), I've set up an automation which does the builds on
GH action runners[1].  This should likely be integrated into php-src or
php-sdk, whereyby the latter needs to be forked into a php organization
repo as soon as possible, since there is a pending commit regarding the
exclusion of yet unsupported PGO training scenarios, and we also should
roll a new SDK release, and update some of the bundled tools.

Anyhow, if these PHP 8.1 builds turn out to be good, I'd also like to do
the PHP 8.0 builds this way; this would free required capacities on the
current build machine (plus save a bit of my time), which is actually
supposed to do the PECL extension builds.  While these builds are
automated, and mostly work well, there are sometimes issues with new
releases and the dependency libraries are rarely updated (a lot of
these[2] are ancient versions).  And although I'm planning to enable
snapshot builds when PHP 8.1 enters the beta release cycle (as usual),
and to do the mass rebuild after PHP 8.1.0 is released, I won't be able
to spend much time to help with resolving issues.  In my opinion, it
would be beneficial to push the burden of providing Windows builds to
the extension maintainers.  There are already AppVeyor integrations for
several PECL extensions, some of them producing binaries which are
basically identical to the PECL builds, and generally Windows CI should
be helpful for package maintainers to detect potential issues before new
releases.  Furthermore, extensions maintainers would be more flexible
regarding the supported PHP version (currently, the PECL builds are done
for PHP 7.3, 7.4 and 8.0 only).

So yes, I'm proposing to stop centralized builds of PECL extensions for
Windows in the long run, and also to stop providing prebuilt dependency
libraries for PECL extensions.  If we do that, we can also sunset the
rmtools[3], which are used to provide snapshot builds of php-src (no
longer the case for PHP 8.0 due to lack of a dedicated build machine;
nightly snapshots are made available by Shivam[4]), and to provide
builds of the PECL extensions.

Thoughts?

[1] <https://github.com/cmb69/php-ftw/>
[2] <https://windows.php.net/downloads/pecl/deps/>
[3] <https://github.com/php/web-rmtools>
[4] <https://github.com/shivammathur/php-builder-windows>

=2D-
Christoph M. Becker