Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:52949
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: error (pb1.pair.com: domain lsces.co.uk from 213.123.26.185 cause and error)
Message-ID: <4DEBC13F.4090706@lsces.co.uk>
Date: Sun, 05 Jun 2011 18:47:43 +0100
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.19) Gecko/20110420 SUSE/2.0.14-2.2 SeaMonkey/2.0.14
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>, Andi Gutmans <andi@zend.com>
References: <8757232E56758B42B2EE4F9D2CA019C901499F97@US-EX2.zend.net>
In-Reply-To: <8757232E56758B42B2EE4F9D2CA019C901499F97@US-EX2.zend.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Bundling "modern" extensions
From: lester@lsces.co.uk (Lester Caine)

(Andi - I sent this before going out this morning - but I can't see it on the 
list this evening ... )

Andi Gutmans wrote:
> I think one of the problems is that in the past we always ensured that the extensions for key current technologies were bundled with PHP i.e. mysql, json&  soap/xml. This was one of our biggest strengths and advantages and it would propagate to Linux distros, shared hosting, etc.. Therefore, I think we should move towards bundling some of the key extensions to ensure they are easily found by people esp. when people are getting them via third parties.

I think people are missing one of the MAIN things here!
How many Linux distributions provide PHP as a single package?

NOTHING needs to be bundled with PHP with the modern methods of package 
management. We just need to fully document and support adding new packages to 
the distributed network of what is available. My SUSE 11.4 package list gives a 
number of perfectly stable third party packages as well as the 'main stream' 
extensions.

It WOULD be nice to restore the parallel system for Windows with the same 
configuration of matching packages?

What also works nicely for me is the distributed .ini structure that SUSE 
introduced. Rather than the vast list of extra package data in php.ini, it is 
simply stripped out to the relevant package.ini file. Switching packages on and 
off is just a matter of adding .off to the end of the .ini file name and 
straight away I can see what I've disabled to test something out.

I would then suggest that some of the things that are currently bundled could 
also be stripped out to allow finer control. Mysqlnd is a case in point. Why 
should I have to build my own copy of PHP just to remove that when there is no 
difference in it being made a shared package? Why do I need APC when I'm happily 
using eaccelerator ... and so on ...

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact
L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk
EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/
Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk//
Firebird - http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php