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Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2011 17:56:30 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Bundling "modern" extensions
From: johannes@schlueters.de (Johannes =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Schl=FCter?=)

On Mon, 2011-06-06 at 10:18 -0500, Larry Garfield wrote:
> The only way, currently, that projects can predict what a given host 
> will have installed is "bundled in core PHP".  If it's in the core PHP 
> bundle, we can *usually* expect it to be there.  If not, we can 
> *usually* presume it won't be.  That's not a hard and fast rule, but 
> it's the best we've got right now.

While that rule is not true by far.
Shared hosting usually does not offer com_dotnet, gettext, interbase,
ldap, mssql, oci8, odbc, pdo_dblib, pdo_firebird, pdo_oci, pdo_odbc,
pdo_pgsql, pgsql, recode, snmp, sybase_ct

I know many which don't provide ftp, gmp, imap, mbstring, openssl, phar,
shmop, sysvmsg, sysvsem, sysvshm, wddx, xmlrpx, zip, zlib

Sometimes for good reasons (a firebird extension makes no sense if you
don't provide firebird) sometimes for strange reasons ("i don't want my
customers to waste CPU/network") so in the end bundling is no guarantee.
and btw. I also now shared hosters which offer PECL stuff after
customers demanded it.

Unless we start a certification program ("PHP Certified Hoster" ..
demanding some specific features etc.) there's little we can do. And I
doubt we want to do that ;-)

So the guessing game is hard.

what I started some years ago was collecting some statistics which is
reported by installers from PHP applications. The first app I'm using
this with is phpMyFAQ, but phpBB3 meanwhile has a similar feature. By
these statistics I can tell that just 1.5% of the people installing
phpMyFAQ are having APC installed, Zend Optimizer is available more
often, 65.7%. 98.7% have the tokenizer extension enabled. Roughly 3/4
are claiming to use hosting companies. (all only counting where users
agreed to send the information, collecting since June 2007, while the
collection logic was broken for a few months now ...)

One day[tm] I plan to make all this data public with a simple query
interface.

I'd also be interested in adding such a data collection to other
software. If you're interested feel free to contact me of list.


johannes