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To: "Marcus Boerger" <helly@php.net>,
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Date: Sun, 3 Feb 2008 17:24:58 -0000
Organization: Zend Technologies
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Splitting the subject: the PECL/PHP relationship
From: steph@zend.com ("Steph Fox")

Hi Marcus,

> Anyway my idea is to start everything in PECL and
> to to move everything out that can be moved out. And that includes all 
> MySQL
> extensions as well as SQLite. Only this way people will use the PELC
> infrastructure. Otherwise we would just reduce functionality of PHP. And 
> btw
> nearly all linux distributions today offer a bunch of PECL extensions, and
> for windows we offer DLLs for most PECL extensions for a long time now.

The problem with this, as I wrote earlier, is that people relying on hosting 
can't use them, and hosts tend not to know as much as they could about PHP 
or its extensions. There does need to be a basic agreement here about what 
PHP is without any additions. IMHO that should be the minimum necessary to 
build a simple website, ie even if your host knows nothing about PHP it's 
still possible to do something useful with it. I suggested SQLite as a way 
of ensuring that there is _some_ database in PHP regardless of whether the 
host has added something or not. PDO should be built-in anyway. Neither is 
the case under doze @ present - both are separate entities that have to be 
explicitly enabled, i.e. there is no intrinsic database support in PHP. And 
yes, you do get Windows hosting these days.

Also, we can't rely on linux distributions/the availability of DLLs on 
php.net for distribution. There needs to be a single simple cross-platform 
method for getting hold of extensions for PHP - but I think Greg's so close 
to achieving that, it isn't really an issue. The problem of zero QA, is.

- Steph