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Date: Fri, 8 Dec 2006 13:17:53 -0500
To: Stanislav Malyshev <stas@zend.com>
Sender: Ilia Alshanetsky <iliaal@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Moving COM, Socket & mhash to PECL
From: ilia@prohost.org (Ilia Alshanetsky)

On 8-Dec-06, at 1:01 PM, Stanislav Malyshev wrote:

>> COM:
>>     Un-maintained at this time and has a fairly serious number of  
>> bugs (26 by latest count, many of which are crashes)
>
> I don't think COM should be moved out. Right, it's windows only -  
> but if you are on windows, COM extension is most useful (I used it  
> a number of times and it's really amazing how easily you can do  
> various data processing stuff if you combine power of PHP with, for  
> example, Excel). As for bugs, they certainly need some attention,  
> only moving it to PECL is not going to do them any better :) And as  
> far as I can see, COM extension does not consume any significant  
> resources. So I don't think it's a good idea to move it out.

Well, it does not consume any resources simply because no one is  
maintaining it ;-). How really different things would be if it were  
in pecl? I mean afaik COM is not enabled by default on win32, so you  
still need to enable it manually. So, the only extra step for people  
who want to use it would be to download it from pecl4win. This  
updates extensions more frequently then we do releases, so it'd  
actually give people the ability to get a more stable version  
(assuming bug fixes are made) far sooner then they'd be able to  
otherwise.

>> 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.
>
> Sounds convincing to me. Only thing I see is that manual right now  
> does not give clear idea of what algorithms hash extension  
> supports. It's not an argument against moving mhash out but  
> suggestion for improvement :)

There is a list on http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.hash- 
algos.php, but I agree that we need a clearer list on the main page  
of the docs for the hash extension.

>> sockets:
>>     Un-maintained.
>>     Majority of what it can do can already by done via streams in  
>> a much more consistent and stable fashion.
>
> The I guess it's ok to move it to 6.0 but I don't think it's ok for  
> 5.2 since there's a potential for people using it in apps and  
> streams has quite different API so it'd require significant rewrite  
> if people want to use it with standard PHP. Thus, not good to  
> change it in minor version.

A good point for 5.2, but given that there is no one to support users  
using this extension if people start using that extension they  
potentially leading themselves to a dead-end. Given how far the  
streams have gone lately I do not believe that there is any interest  
in maintaining this extension any further.

Ilia Alshanetsky