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To: PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 10:03:41 -0700
Subject: Per-request UG(unicode)
From: andrei@gravitonic.com (Andrei Zmievski)

Andi asked me to forward this, since it didn't go through to the list 
on the first try.

> Hi,
>
> The following is a patch Dmitry did to change UG(unicode) to be 
> configurable
> per-request. The guidelines from Andrei was that it shouldn't make the
> extension code much more complicated and with this patch it doesn't. 
> As it
> is, most of the logic is already decided upon at runtime so this patch
> shouldn't have significant performance impact.
> Some reasons to do it:
> A) Per-virtual host configuration of UG(unicode) is very important for 
> any
> server running multiple sites on the same machine.
> B) Running multiple apps on the same machine will most probably 
> require some
> apps to run with Unicode on and some with it off.
> C) We are discovering some BC quirks with the current Unicode 
> implementation
> (md5() for example). It's not clear if/how we can resolve those quotes 
> in a
> transparent way or not. Making the UG(unicode) flag flexible will
> significantly help in migrations which might be lengthier than expected
> (having two versions in separate vhosts running on the same box for
> migration purposes).
>
> Anyway, although the diff is big the change to extension authors is 
> very
> minimal and we did the hard work already. Please check it out and see 
> if it
> works on your machine. I think unless there are very significant 
> reasons not
> to include this, we really should. Not allowing per-vhost selection of
> Unicode setting will cripple PHP 6 for anyone who isn't running on a
> dedicated server, and for some companies like Zend, who run more than 
> one
> app on the same machine, it could also cripple things on dedicated 
> servers.
>
> Thx.
>
> Andi
>

The patch is available at:

http://www.php.net/~andrei/u-5.diff

-Andrei