On Thu, 18 May 2023 at 16:27, Deleu <deleu...@gmail.com> wrote: Monolog is a great example of what PHP is missing - a single library for a > purpose. I have never worked with any other library besides Monolog and I > never worked on any project which didn't have it installed. Perhaps my > bubble might be a limiting factor here, but I get a feeling that Monolog is > considered to be The Logging PHP Library. >
Then in what sense is it "missing"? What value would be served by placing an elephant logo on it, and renaming it "PHPLog™"? I know that's a bit of a sarcastic response, but it's also a serious one - what would we define as the aims of a replacement for Monolog, which aren't currently being served? We could guarantee it was installed with every version of PHP, but only by severely restricting its release cycle, so that every PHP version had exactly one version of Monolog. If it remains an independently versioned Composer package, I can't think of much that would change. > Laravel's `Arr` class also didn't get scrutinized by PHP RFC so there's no > way to know whether it's all good, some good or all bad. > I don't think PHP's decision-making process can be held up as a shining example of good governance, in contrast to everyone else's anarchy. I don't know much about Laravel's governance, but I am quite sure every change is discussed and iterated on before release. In fact, they probably have a whole bunch of standards and processes that PHP is lacking, and would have to invent to make any new library a success. > ... it takes away all the time and energy collectively spent in evaluating > options and their reputations. > I don't think that's really true; reputations have to be earned, and maintained. Taking the logging example, imagine we decided that, to paraphrase Dr Strangelove, "We can't allow a logging gap!" So we hack together a logging package that's worse in every way than Monolog, but call it "official". Half the community will ignore it and carry on using Monolog; the other half won't realise that a better alternative exists, and be worse off from today. I actually wonder if some things in core should be removed to encourage userland replacements - ext/soap, for instance, and some of the data structures in ext/spl. IMHO, the things that would benefit from being written in PHP then bundled are things that are so low-level that it's hard to get them wrong; the building blocks that the community will use to build things like Monolog and Guzzle. Regards, -- Rowan Tommins [IMSoP]
