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Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2008 04:42:39 -0500
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Splitting the subject: the PECL/PHP relationship
From: ben@prodigal.ca (Ben Trafford)


At 04:33 AM 2/4/2008, Derick Rethans wrote:
>On Sun, 3 Feb 2008, Steph Fox wrote:
>
> > Everything else - the fashionistas (JSON, xmlreader/writer) and 
> the downright
> > useful for some but not all (fileinfo, json, com_dotnet, posix) 
> and the quirky
> > stuff (pretty much anything Sara came up with) - should be in PECL.
>
>I see another issue after reading this, and that is that it makes it
>much harder for users to depend on specific extensions just being always
>available by default. It's important for application distributers to
>have this core set of extensions to rely on. It's annoying enough that
>some distributions (gentoo, freebsd) already use --disable-all and their
>users then bugging us (or me) with "you should check that SPL is enabled
>in your code".

         Just poking up my head to concur with Derick. What one 
person thinks of as 'fashionistas', another person will think of as 
absolutely core and necessary -- for example, I use xmlreader/writer 
in almost every piece of code I put out. If it were suddenly part of 
a PECL, a whole bunch of things I've written would break instantly. 
Yes, it's easy enough to work around, but backwards-compatibility 
will make for a happy PHP community.

--->Ben