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Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:21:38 -0600
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] re-proposal of pecl/phar for inclusion in core
From: greg@chiaraquartet.net (Gregory Beaver)

Stanislav Malyshev wrote:
>> Current status of phar addresses most of these criticisms:
>
> Looks impressive, great work!
>
>> phar implements zip support with native PHP code, enabling some features
>
> I am a bit confused about native PHP code here - we are talking baout
> an extension, right? So what exactly is meant here?
> Also, as I understand, there are features that ext/zip missed and phar
> extension needs. Any reason not to add them to ext/zip? 

Hi Stas,

Sorry, just a confusion of language on my part.  ext/zip relies on
libzip, an external lib that uses malloc/open and zlib directly. 
pecl/phar has built-in zip support based on php internals, it uses
emalloc/streams which is what allows zlib/bz2 to be optional deps. 
Pierre and I are talking about merging efforts, which would benefit
everyone.  "libifying" the zip support in pecl/phar would be a
relatively simple task, although some of the features are phar-specific,
such as opendir() support.  ext/zip would need to copy the generic
opendir() stuff we use to get that (it scans all files to figure out
which ones are in a directory, which is O(n) but works).  zip support is
only a small part of phar's features, merging all of phar's features
into ext/zip would not make any sense and would confuse folks
tremendously, such as being able to create tar archives with ext/zip :).

Hopefully, the question of how the zip support will eventually end up
looking (inside phar, phar/zip merge, new php zip lib) is kind of a
non-issue.  I'm very confident Pierre, Marcus, Steph and I will be able
to work out the best solution for both ext/zip and pecl/phar, the main
question at this point is bundling phar.

Greg