Hi,

In a recent chat between the PHP Foundation developers, we discussed 
unbundling several extensions.


ext/imap

The library that provides the functionality in this extension, c-client, 
is no longer updated. The last release from 2007 is no longer available 
on the original distributor's (University of Washington) website, but 
there is an unofficial GitHub repository that hasn't been updated for 5 
years either (https://github.com/uw-imap/imap).

You can't also use this any more with G Suite due to authentication 
changes (https://github.com/uw-imap/imap/issues/4).

There are several user-land packages that are still maintained, and 
provide superior functionality:

- https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer
- https://github.com/zetacomponents/Mail/
- https://github.com/symfony/mailer
- https://github.com/laminas/laminas-mail


ext/pspell

The original underlying library hasn't been updated since 2001 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pspell) and it's replacement, aspell not 
since 2019 (https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/).

There are other replacements, ispell, and hunspell, but they don't seem 
to be compatible API-wise. The PECL extension "enchant" was supposed 
to be able to use with all of these, but is also no longer maintained 
(last release in 2009, https://pecl.php.net/package/enchant).

Again, there are several user land composer packages 
(https://packagist.org/?query=spell) that can be used instead.


ext/oci8

Requires a proprietary library from large commercial enterprise
(https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/instant-client.html) and 
has many outstanding bugs:
https://bugs.php.net/search.php?cmd=display&package_name[]=PDO+OCI&package_name[]=OCI8+related&package_name[]=Oracle+related&order_by=ts1&direction=ASC&limit=30&status=Open&reorder_by=ts1
https://github.com/php/php-src/labels/Extension%3A%20oci8

Most of the recent changes were all to skip tests.

It is also one of the larger extensions left that had not had their 
resource type converted to objects. This is a major effort, and frankly, 
probably something that should be done by the corporate sponsor of the 
oracle extensions.


Please remember, that unbundling extensions does not mean that they 
disappear. They will be moved to PECL with a release made.

An RFC will of course be forthcoming, but we thought it best to email 
the list first.


cheers,
Derick

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