MR> (Sorry if I missed something, but this seems like a no-brainer)
Forcing all developers to work with a broken environment will make development ineffective/inefficient.
The distribution is "broken," but that doesn't affect development. The only difference from a developer perspective at this point is that you'll need to make "releases" of your code (which is a good thing), and that you'll have a package file per-extension.
On the *server* there will be a symlink connecting php5/ext and pecl. So long as you checkout php5, you'll have all the extensions, and
everything will work honkey dorey.
-Sterling
This impression that moving to PECL is going to break everything is along the lines of PECL being Siberia, and it's quite annoying. It doesn't matter if 'pear build xxx' doesn't work quite right on all systems right now, and doesn't support win32 now (it did at one point, I put the code in for it).
In the short term, the move has little or no consequence since to most developers there will be no difference (except maybe a hickup or two in cvs), it'll be as if nothing happened. In practical terms, it moves us a small step closer to the reality of having a release and distribution mechanism for extensions, and does it at a time and place where any cvs disruption will be 'minimal'.
Contrary to popular belief, you will still be able to build PHP with extensions compiled internally, you will still be able to build PHP for win32, you will still get everything in the source distribution. Doing this move will provide a couple benefits *now* that are needed in general to move PECL forward, those benefits are mostly from the perception problem that has grown around PECL.
The benefits that PECL can provide will take some time, but if everyone expects those to be *done* before we do anything, nothing will ever get done. I for one applaud Sterlings work here to get the ball rolling (and the many others who have done much work).
I'm not saying this small step will be picture perfect (i'm too reserved for that), but it will not break things until that day in the future when PECL is done and doing everything everyone can dream of.
Shane
PS: I also would not mind seeing PECL at the top level.
-- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
