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Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 23:09:11 +0000
Message-ID: <CA+kxMuTLvo+B8wSvWDD2che9KsHBkjK6Zr9_VAEJrNgoj0U+7w@mail.gmail.com>
To: Pierre Joye <pierre.php@gmail.com>
Cc: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: Top 10 Pecl extensions PHP7 compatibility
From: danack@basereality.com (Dan Ackroyd)

On 16 January 2015 at 00:03, Pierre Joye <pierre.php@gmail.com> wrote:
> It is also important to note that I would like to push the usage of install
> from git/other VCS in the near term, using pickle, and use the website only
> for the meta info but not (or much less) for hosting the releases.

As well as that, I think more of the ecosystem of extensions needs to
be thought about, in particular where the issue tracker for extensions
lives. Although it made sense in the past to have all issues tracked
on bugs.php.net (due to the difficulty of hosting an issue tracker) it
is not optimal now, and has a couple of problems.

i) Because the issues are away from the code repository, it's far
harder for people to contribute to extensions that it would be if
everything is in one place.

It's also difficult for people to make a code fix in their own fork
and let other people be aware that the fix exists and use it. This is
obviously much easier on Github where the entry barrier to commenting
on issues is much lower, as well the barrier to making your code
available to other people.

This would be very useful where the alledged maintainers of an
extension are no longer responding to emails.

ii) Most of the issues related to a particular PECL package can only
be handled by someone who is actively maintaining the extension. For
example, the Gearman extension is a relatively modern extension that
is actively maintained and yet still has 21 open issues, some dating
back years.

Having those issues open in the PHP bug tracker rather than in the
Gearman repository on Github does not help anyone, and just clogs up
the PHP bug tracker with items that PHP developers can't help with.

A couple of examples of other PECL extensions:

https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=66194
https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=59171

It's a waste of time having these things open in bugs.php.net. I think
it would be better to require extensions that don't ship as part of
the PHP official packages to have their issues hosted elsewhere -
which would probably be Github for the majority of extensions.

Changing the ecosystem shouldn't be a decision rushed into, but it
would be good to think about how to make it better.

cheers
Dan