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Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2007 10:43:34 +0200 (CEST)
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Subject: Regarding the ext/curl extension
From: daniel@haxx.se (Daniel Stenberg)

Hi PHP hackers!

(I'm not subscribed, please CC me if you want me to read your responses.)

I am the primary author and maintainer of the libcurl library, the underlying 
library that supports the PHP extension named... eh, right. What is the 
extension called really? CURL? ext/curl? curl?

I'm writing to you to ask for your help to clear up some of the worst 
confusions you (in the PHP project) and we (in the cURL project) are causing 
the users of your PHP binding for libcurl.

Here's the story (of course described here with my heavy bias):

o You call the binding CURL or similar. The heavy mentioning of libcurl in
   your docs also tend to make PHP people to believe they actually "use
   libcurl".

o There's a huge lack of docs for the PHP binding for libcurl on the php.net
   site. Most options are only listed with their names, so to figure out
   exactly what the names mean (and more) they need to search elsewhere.

o The elsewhere is very much likely the curl web site, which indeed does have
   all the options documented (but for the libcurl C API, where they have the
   same names...).

o But before the poor PHP users have reached the docs and figured out what
   they mean, they have run head-first into this wall: in our project we have a
   "libcurl" (which is a library with a C API/function interface) and we have a
   "curl" command line tool.

   So now the users are mighty confused. They think they're using CURL, curl or
   libcurl and here we claim they are not using curl nor libcurl...

   In a (private) conversation with a PHP team member he said the extension is
   called 'ext/curl' but I don't think that's a lot better since that's just
   going to be seen as "the extension called curl" to people. And then we're
   back on square 0.

o In order to remedy this problem that really is a huge support issue for us
   (since for some funny reason the curl-and-php mailing list is hosted by us
   and I think I do the majority of the support on this list even though the
   binding is the product of your project...), I have simply decided to refer
   to the binding with a unique name that is not the exact same (case
   differences ignored) as one of our products. I call it PHP/CURL. (I did try
   to contact some of you back when this problem made my bubble burst, but I
   never got any responses and thus I proceeded anyway.) But now I'm here to
   let you know about my pains.

o I've been told by more than one PHP team member that renaming the extension
   in your end is more or less out of the question, so even though I would
   *really* want that (and no other libcurl binding has hijacked one of our
   names like this), I can only see one really good way to solve this problem.
   And please do notice that this problem occurs only to YOUR users of YOUR
   binding.

The Solution (as i see it - I'll just stress that again)

You need to vastly extend the amount of documentation for the PHP binding for 
libcurl (I seriously don't know how to refer to it) on your site to 
drastically reduce the need for your users to go searching for the information 
on other sites, since the very moment they do that they enter the name- 
confusion maze and then a large amount of them are lost...

This solution is rather half-baked, but I can't see any proper solution 
without a rename of the binding.

Of course, it would also help if there would actually be PHP hackers involved 
on the curl-and-php mailing list to help out.

I'll be happy to hear if you have any other thoughts or ideas on how to 
improve this situation.