Morning Nikita, +1 on the change to cli.
It can't really be a default extension right now because readline license is not compatible: https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/3823 Even without the license problem, I'm not convinced of the value of adding the dependency: Because of this long standing strange behaviour, I don't really think the interactive shell is well used. Cheers Joe On Wed, 12 May 2021 at 10:48, Nikita Popov <nikita....@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, May 12, 2021 at 10:37 AM Moritz Friedrich <m...@9dev.de> wrote: > > > > > > Am 12.05.2021 um 10:12 schrieb Nikita Popov <nikita....@gmail.com>: > > > > > > Hi internals, > > > > > > If the readline extension is enabled, PHP provides an interactive shell > > > under -a. If it is not enabled, it falls back to an "interactive mode" > > > (yes, the difference between "interactive shell" and "interactive mode" > > is > > > important here). The interactive mode is simply an stdin input, which > > needs > > > to be terminated using Ctrl+D. You can only run one script that way. > > > > > > I think the current behavior is quite confusing, because it's really > not > > > obvious that you ended up in this fallback mode (you need to know the > > > difference between "shell" and "mode" in the output) and most people > > > wouldn't know what to do with it. The latest instance of this is > > > https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=81033. > > > > > > I think we would be better off disabling -a completely if readline is > not > > > available, and exit with a helpful error message. I've opened > > > https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/6976 to that effect. Does that > sound > > > reasonable? > > > > > > Regards, > > > Nikita > > > > Hi Nikita, > > if I may ask, would it also be possible to have deadline as a mandatory > > dependency to always have the interactive shell available? Is there a > good > > reason to compile PHP without? Having a basic prompt available is really > > handy at times — especially looking at Node.js with their > ahead-completion > > and general UX. > > The same has been done for other PHP modules in the past, so I wonder if > > we could simply have readline as a guarantee. > > > The readline extension has an external dependency on readline / libedit. > Making it a required extension would also make this a required dependency. > We avoid having dependencies for the minimal build. The only dependency we > currently have is libpcre, and we vendor that one. I doubt we'll want to > add a new vendored dependency, as they tend to be a major pain. > > I personally do not use the interactive shell (and I think most people who > do use *an* interactive shell prefer psysh), so I don't think this can be > reasonably considered a "required" feature. > > Regards, > Nikita >
