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Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 12:08:38 -0500
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Subject: Providing Visual Studio 2005 builds (again)
From: emsmith@elizabethmariesmith.com (Elizabeth Smith)

Afternoon,
and don't shoot me,

I'd like to bring up the topic of providing builds created with Visual 
Studio 2005 again.  I know that until Apache and other Open Source 
software makes the move as well, we can't provide ONLY 2005 builds 
because they just won't work properly, the runtimes will crash and 
things will blow up.

But what is the thought of providing additional builds?  I'm thinking 
specifically of Windows users running FastCGI probably on IIS with a 
non-threadsafe build (implying that they're not point and click 
installer happy already, and therefore a step above the general 
population), who would get the most performance increases out of the 
switch to the new compiler.  So basically a special non thread safe and 
2005 compile for additional download.  I'm well aware that the process 
of doing this needs to be well thought out and planned, but PHP users 
are notorious for not testing things that aren't available right on the 
downloads page, and people at Microsoft have made the request that 
binaries be made available on the php.net site.

I'd be willing to help create builds of common open source libraries 
that PHP links against, such as libiconv and libxml2, with the newer 
compiler so there are no runtime issues originating from that angle. 
But until people start using it, we can't really see where issues are 
going to appear.  And I know it will be a big job to get all the open 
source libraries php extensions link against migrated to the new 
compiler (and impossible for the closed source ones) - but I think we 
need to be proactive in this and not sit around until Apache migrates 
and then have everything break ;)

Opinions? Thoughts?  And yes I am volunteering to help with the work, 
not just whining for a solution.

Thanks,
Elizabeth Marie Smith