On Fri, Aug 30, 2024, at 20:13, Christoph M. Becker wrote: > On 30.08.2024 at 19:05, Jim Winstead wrote: > > [snip] > > And generally, while there are many well maintained extensions on PECL, > most (i.e. way more than half of the extension there) are outright > abandoned, dead or half-dead, a lot of the latter barely kept alive by > Remi Collet. A next generation PECL (installer) will not change this; > only people who actively care about these extension could, if these > people have knowledge of PHP extension development. > > I'm not saying that all PECL extensions deserve to be kept alive; there > are good reasons for many to have been abandoned, e.g. because they were > built on no longer supported libraries, are generally not useful > anymore, or would be written in PHP nowadays (e.g. ext/dbase). > > Instead I'm saying that we should be careful to unbundle extensions. > This should probably seen as a last resort if we absolutely can't > maintain the extension any longer, or it doesn't make sense to do that. > I'm not sure yet that ext/snmp falls into this category. > > It's easy to vote "yes, unbundle this extension" if you've never used > the extension and are not planning to do so in the future. It may be a > death sentence, though. > > Christoph >
I went over to pecl to see how hard it was to create a new extension (after being prompted by Gina to submit my GMP operator stuff as a pecl extension). It appears to be very involved with a checkmark: "I have already discussed the topic of maintaining and/or adding a PECL extension on the pecl-...@lists.php.net mailing list, and we determined it's time for me to have a PECL account" I, personally, can't imagine going through such a process. Not only do you have to convince gate-keepers you don't know to share your extension with (which higher up on the page says your code should be complete), but also convince end-users to use your extension. The barrier of entry is high, when it would be much easier to just create a repository and instructions; effectively making discovery of interesting php extensions nearly impossible. If you are using something like Docker containers, there is https://github.com/mlocati/docker-php-extension-installer which go so far as to install extensions from github (and apply patches) if they aren't updated/available in pecl (example: memcached + php 8 had an issue that was fixed on github but didn't get an update on pecl for nearly a year, IIRC). I'm pretty excited about pecl's replacement (how is that going anyway?) and hope it will be easier to create, maintain, and distribute extensions with. In other words, I emphatically agree that moving extensions out of core and into pecl would be a death sentence. — Rob
