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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] What to do with ext/snmp?
In-Reply-To: <9791621c-1313-4306-bc6a-5dd789f2b2df@gmx.de>
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2024 13:54:15 -0300
Cc: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Message-ID: <51FA7D6F-09F6-4267-9B57-5CBD42EA898C@cmpct.info>
References: <9791621c-1313-4306-bc6a-5dd789f2b2df@gmx.de>
To: "Christoph M. Becker" <cmbecker69@gmx.de>
From: calvin@cmpct.info (Calvin Buckley)

On Aug 29, 2024, at 2:49=E2=80=AFPM, Christoph M. Becker =
<cmbecker69@gmx.de> wrote:
>=20
> Hi all,
>=20
> it seems to me that we're pulling through ext/snmp without having any
> real expert of the protocol, let alone of the implementation.  The
> extension has no code owner, and according to EXTENSIONS, it has no
> primary maintainer for more than ten years.  Skimming through the =
commit
> log mostly shows general clean-ups and changes.  And seeing that there
> have only two issues been reported on Github[1], I would conclude that
> either the extension just works as expected, or that it is not used
> much.  A recent doc-bug report[2] makes me believe it's the latter.
>=20
> Personally, I barely know what SNMP is used for, but have no deeper
> understanding of that protocol, and I can remember that it took me =
quite
> a while to work out how to even set up a testing environment on =
Windows
> (without understanding the details).
>=20
> So the question is: do we have any SNMP experts (or some who want to
> become SNMP experts) around, who would want to take a look at the
> extension and its documentation?
>=20
> [1]
> =
<https://github.com/php/php-src/issues?q=3Dis%3Aissue+label%3A%22Extension=
%3A+snmp%22+is%3Aopen>
> [2] <https://github.com/php/doc-en/issues/3690>
>=20
> Christoph

I suspect it's not in high use either; Michael's reply suggests that.
Maybe it could be spun out to PECL if there's a lack of interest in it,
like imap was?

(stupid speculation follows, people who know the history correct me)

There are a few other extensions like that in ext/. I'm thinking a lot
of them would have been in PECL or done in userland, but they were at
the right place in the right time and ended up in ext/ instead. They
might predate PECL (seems to be the case for SNMP), or wrapped a library
hat was mature and well-used when it was written (seemed to the case for
imap).=