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Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2016 16:03:44 +0200
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Subject: Re: [RFC] orphan extensions cleanup
From: cmbecker69@gmx.de ("Christoph M. Becker")

On 15.08.2016 at 07:53, Stanislav Malyshev wrote:

> I'd like to propose an RFC to deal with extensions that currently have
> no maintainer:
> 
> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/umaintained_extensions
> 
> The main goal of the RFC is to initiate the process that by the time of
> 7.1 release will result in no extensions in PHP core being unmaintained.
> The process would be as follows:
> 
> 1. Issue a call for maintainers (specific details of how, where, etc.
> are to be discussed, ideas welcome).
> 2. Wait for suitable time and hopefully find new maintainers for most or
> all extensions. For some stable ones not much commitment is needed
> beyond declaring you are willing to be responsible for them, should the
> need arise, for others some bugfixing may be in order :)
> 3. If after suitable time we can not find anybody to care enough for the
> extension to be responsible, move the extension from core to PECL.
> 
> Please note that the ideal result is 2, not 3, but the goal is still to
> have no unmaintained extensions in core.
> 
> Please comment and discuss!

Thanks for your work on this RFC! :-)

Generally, I'm all for moving unmaintained extensions to PECL.  However,
I wonder on what information the concrete selection of unmaintained
extensions in the RFC is based.  If it is php-src/EXTENSIONS, the RFC is
moot, in my opinion, as this file is grossly out-dated.  It seems that
at least a third of the maintainers listed there have been inactive for
years.  For instance, Stefan is claimed to be the maintainer of ftp, but
his most recent commit to this extension appears to be from 2002.  (No
complaint, just an observation.)  Another example is sqlite3, where
Scott's most recent commit has been 5 years ago.  Yet another example:
Marcus's most recent commit to simplexml is from 2008.  As final example
I mention bcmath, where Andi has made his most recent commit 2004.

Again, I don't complain that the maintainers are inactive (what is
absolutely fine for me), but rather that php-src/EXTENSIONS is totally
out-dated.

The bug tracker statistics appear to present a somewhat more realistic
view: <https://bugs.php.net/stats.php>.  The topmost bundled extensions
having the most unresolved issues are standard, soap, date, spl and pdo.
 The XML related extensions (libxml, dom, simplexml, xml, etc.) also sum up.

-- 
Christoph M. Becker