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Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2024 20:13:46 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] What to do with ext/snmp?
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To: Jim Winstead <jimw@trainedmonkey.com>, internals@lists.php.net
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From: cmbecker69@gmx.de ("Christoph M. Becker")

On 30.08.2024 at 19:05, Jim Winstead wrote:

> Perhaps if the effort from the PHP Foundation to build a next-generation PECL bears fruit, an even harder look can be taken at migrating out even more of the extensions still living in the php-src tree. With some robust CI, care could be made to make sure changes in php-src that impact extensions is noticed and dealt with, but spinning them out on their own might make them easier for more people to contribute to and maintain.

Let's see what happened with the latest unbundled extensions:

* PHP 7.4 unbundled ext/wddx, ext/recode and ext/interbase; neither has
any release on PECL; they are effectively dead.  At least the latter is
still barely maintained outside of PECL.

* PHP 8.0 unbundled ext/xmlrpc, which had three releases, and given that
I'm listed as maintainer, I'd say that extension is also dead.

* PHP 8.4 unbundled imap and pspell.  These had two releases each, but I
wouldn't hold my breath for a third.

* PHP 8.4 also unbundled oci8 and pdo_oci.  The former has already been
partially maintained on PECL.  Regarding the latter Christoph Jones is
struggling to keep it somewhat maintained (due to lack of time).

And generally, while there are many well maintained extensions on PECL,
most (i.e. way more than half of the extension there) are outright
abandoned, dead or half-dead, a lot of the latter barely kept alive by
Remi Collet.  A next generation PECL (installer) will not change this;
only people who actively care about these extension could, if these
people have knowledge of PHP extension development.

I'm not saying that all PECL extensions deserve to be kept alive; there
are good reasons for many to have been abandoned, e.g. because they were
built on no longer supported libraries, are generally not useful
anymore, or would be written in PHP nowadays (e.g. ext/dbase).

Instead I'm saying that we should be careful to unbundle extensions.
This should probably seen as a last resort if we absolutely can't
maintain the extension any longer, or it doesn't make sense to do that.
I'm not sure yet that ext/snmp falls into this category.

It's easy to vote "yes, unbundle this extension" if you've never used
the extension and are not planning to do so in the future.  It may be a
death sentence, though.

Christoph