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Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:08:33 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Why is ereg being deprecated?
From: mls@pooteeweet.org (Lukas Kahwe Smith)

Wow, you sure do assume a lot of things about PHP and its development  
community. I have never seen your name on this list before and (now I  
am assuming) do not know the state of development of PHP6 (as in that  
its more or less on halt until someone gets things going again).

On 12.10.2009, at 18:57, Mark Krenz wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 04:27:02PM GMT, Pierre Joye [pierre.php@gmail.com 
> ] said the following:
>>
>> The ereg functions cannot work with Unicode and can't be fixed  
>> without
>> rewriting them. Nobody likes to do it as pcre works just fine and has
>> many active maintainers (inside and outside php).
>>
>
>  But I'm willing to bet that the majority of people are using ereg,  
> not
> PCRE.  I've known about PCRE in PHP for a while now, but I continue to
> use ereg because I thought it had better support in PHP and that it  
> was
> the more "official" function. Guess I was wrong.  I'm sure I'm not the
> only one who thought this.

Maybe try to substantiate that argument with a google code search or  
something. Personally I have seen quite the opposite, then again I  
have been actively encouraging people to use preg since about 5 or  
more years now.

> Again, this isn't a debate on which is better, I only want to STRONGLY
> stress that I think its a big mistake to remove it in 6.0. If you  
> wanted
> to remove it in 6.0, you should have sent out the deprecated warning  
> in
> the whole 5.0 series, not just 5.3, which most people don't even use.
> If nobody simply wants to do the work to make sure ereg is ready for  
> PHP
> 6 and unicode support, then you are not doing your job.  I hate to  
> call
> it a job because I'm sure that you all enjoy doing PHP development,  
> but
> there are times when you have to bite the bullet and do the hard work
> because its your responsibility to do so.

Our job for the most of us is to convince our boss's that the time we  
spend on company time is a worthwhile investment. There are of course  
people who work on PHP for fun in their spare time .. not sure if job  
fits the description for stuff they want to do. Anyways, that doesnt  
mean that either of the two mentioned "groups" of developers isnt  
doing a lot of boring tedious work for PHP as it is.

>  I feel like I shouldn't even have to tell you this, you develop a
> programming language that is known by millions and runs web apps that
> are used by the whole Internet.

Well the whole internet hasnt setup a donation box to pay for  
developers to work on stuff like this full time.

>  If ereg isn't ready yet then 6.0 should be delayed until it is ready.
> Somehow I doubt that you'd have trouble finding volunteers to do the
> work if they know what was at stake. There are probably a lot of  
> people
> out there perhaps even on this list that would love to show off their
> chops by submitting some piece of code that will get them noticed. If
> those of you that have responded are not willing to do the work, then
> open it up for review by others. Send out a call for volunteers. Maybe
> my inquiry will spark some interest. Imagine being able to say that  
> you
> were the one that saved the ereg function.


Well again an assumption .. no we do not have enough developers to do  
all the cool things we can think up and still fix bugs, document stuff  
etc. Feel free to step up .. but it makes no sense to start a php.net  
plea for help to get something ported to PHP6, where we will have a  
perfectly fine alternative.

regards,
Lukas Kahwe Smith
mls@pooteeweet.org