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Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2005 21:11:42 +0100
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Subject: extension naming
From: lsmith@php.net (Lukas Smith)

Hi,

I guess xmlprci is following the mysqli example. I am not sure if this 
is a good idea to have new BC breaking versions of extensions append 
letters like "i" (aka "improved") to solve the namespace issue. So I 
would like to bring this topic up for discussion on this list before too 
many other extensions blindly follow this example, just because of the 
lack of a standarized alternative.

Anyways I dont really know if anyone from php core cares about these 
kinds of topics so just tell me to stfu before we get a needless flame.

The obvious problem is:
What comes after "i"?
How transparent is this naming scheme to the user?

We had to address a similar problem in PEAR and we currently have the 
following regulation in place which is a solution which is not beautiful 
either:
http://pear.php.net/group/docs/20031114-bbr.php

I guess the only advantage to using letters to denote new major versions 
is that I dont know anyone else using "i" as a postfix like this. So we 
are less likely to clash with a theoretically possible xmlrpc2 standard 
if we were to use the more common method of appending numbers.

Also while xmlrpci is only a pecl ext for now is seems like it registers 
a class called xmlrpc ("REGISTER_XMLRPCI_CLASS(xmlrpc, rpc, NULL, 0)"). 
I dont think this is a good idea either.

regards,
Lukas