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To: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Date: Fri, 8 Dec 2006 11:03:23 -0500
Sender: Ilia Alshanetsky <iliaal@gmail.com>
Subject: Moving COM, Socket & mhash to PECL
From: ilia@prohost.org (Ilia Alshanetsky)

This is an exploratory e-mail,  so don't panic just yet :-). I am  
thinking of moving the COM, mhash and socket extensions to PECL in  
5.2 and 6.0 releases and was hoping to hear for & against arguments.
The reason for the making this move are as follows:

COM:
	Un-maintained at this time and has a fairly serious number of bugs  
(26 by latest count, many of which are crashes)
	Only usable to Win32 users, which I think we all admit are a  
minority and can always download readily available binaries from  
pec4win. Since most of them don't compile the extension from source  
anyway there is IMHO little reason to bundle the sources with every  
php package.
	Moving it to PECL will allow for an independent release cycle, which  
may allow for faster fix deployment etc...
	I hoping the move will encourage people and/or companies to start  
maintaining the extension.

mhash:
	Everything this extension that relies on an external lib to do, is  
already done by hash extension that is enabled by default and  
requires no external libs. There is simply no reason to keep it around.

sockets:
	Un-maintained.
	Majority of what it can do can already by done via streams in a much  
more consistent and stable fashion.


Ilia Alshanetsky