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Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2007 13:55:38 -0700
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To: Daniel Stenberg <daniel@haxx.se>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Regarding the ext/curl extension
From: rasmus@lerdorf.com (Rasmus Lerdorf)

Daniel Stenberg wrote:
> On Tue, 31 Jul 2007, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:
> 
>> Daniel, I don't really understand what renaming the extension would
>> accomplish.
> 
> Then I didn't make myself clear.
> 
> The point of renaming would be to allow people to search for something
> with a name that doesn't confuse them. If the binding would be called
> 'mombamoolo', they would search for that and they would certainly not be
> confused by products or projects called curl or libcurl (even if they
> would know that mombamoolo uses libcurl).
> 
> Now they search for curl and libcurl instead, and they read the docs on
> our site, and yes some of them get angry or even hostile on us when they
> can't find enough details about PHP on our curl site.
> 
> Then again, I did say I realize that a rename won't happen.
> 
>> And the curl_setopt() page lists more than just the names of the
>> options.
> 
> Hm, I stand corrected. I obviously haven't paying attention. I guess I
> was fooled by the "constants" page... Sorry, my bad.
> 
> Still, this is a real problem to many PHP users of this extension. Like
> it or not...
> 
> (and no, I don't suggest that name, it was picked randomly just to make
> my point)

We'll go through and clean up and improve the documentation.  We even
have volunteers to do so now.  But many people don't take the time to
read the docs, no matter how good they may be, so this problem isn't
really going to go away.  Perhaps you should simply redirect people to
the php-general list, or at least have an automatic FAQ answer with the
relevant links to the PHP documentation.  Even the current curl_setopt
page should answer many questions people have.  The short url for it is
http://php.net/curl_setopt

We have had the problem of support spillover before in the project,
especially to the smaller 3rd-party libs we link against, and it tends
to simply be a matter of scale.  The number of people using PHP is
massive, and there will always be a certain percentage of people using
any technology that will be confused and start sending uninformed
questions to every mailing list they can find.  We do our best to
provide good and accessible documentation to alleviate this, but there
is only so much we can do.

-Rasmus