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Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:53:13 +0100
Message-ID: <CAMUwpuTP1ga6uuWNxe4ZLA+1QNnO1NAovoQQEgppAxJ4KkPOEA@mail.gmail.com>
To: Gustavo Lopes <glopes@nebm.ist.utl.pt>
Cc: "internals@lists.php.net" <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=047d7b343ae4e2c4b504bb35249a
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] default charset confusion
From: jpauli@php.net (jpauli)

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On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 3:37 PM, Gustavo Lopes <glopes@nebm.ist.utl.pt>wrote:

> On Wed, 14 Mar 2012 14:55:17 +0100, jpauli <jpauli@php.net> wrote:
>
>  I would then propose to make mbstring compile time mandatory.
>>
>>
> I'm completely against these kind of lazy solutions. Yes, let's add strong
> coupling (already starting to smell) to one of the largest extensions and
> make it compile time mandatory because it simplifies the implementation of
> a dubiously useful feature like Zend multibyte. Remember PHP is sometimes
> used in environments with limited memory/disk space.
>
> Also mbstring takes a long time to build (relatively speaking). Just that
> would be a strong argument against making it mandatory, at least for people
> like me that compile PHP with --disable-all very frequently.
>
>
>  I'm against yet another global ini setting, I find the actual ini
>> settings confusing enough to add one more that would moreover reflect
>> mbstring one's (and add more and more confusion).
>> Why not turn ext/mbstring mandatory at compile time, for all future PHP
>> versions, like preg or spl are ?
>>
>> We do need multibyte handling either. ZendEngine takes advantage of
>> mbstring for internal encoding as well, so I probably missed something as
>> why it is still possible to --disable-mbstring (or not add
>> --enable-mbstring) when compiling ? Has it a huge performance impact ?
>>
>>
> mbstring hooks to basically all phases of PHP process/request
> startup/shutdown. Some efforts were made to mitigate the impact of this in
> 5.4 (see e.g. r301068), but at least some impact is inevitable. Of course,
> if you start enabling certain features of mbstring (zend multibyte hooks,
> translation of input variables, function overload) then it starts to be
> significant. However, there are other more compelling reasons not to make
> it required (see above).
>
> --
> Gustavo Lopes
>

That makes sense to me :-)

But we should think about complexity in the final choice.
Having something like "internal_encoding" adding in PHP.ini will confuse
people, at least, if we dont clearly explain them what the setting is for.
The name is nearly the same as mbstring's.

I recently opened a doc bug about multibyte handling in 5.4 (#61373) , as
the documentation is really light on that point

Julien.P

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