- you don't need a tool - well php - but hey you probbaly have that tool
Yes, but they can't open it by any other standard system tool. I.e. you always need PHP - and of specific version - to work with this file. And I don't know how you expect all kinds of proven and widely used tools like mod_rewrite, .htaccess, etc. to work with phar-ed application.
- you can run phar archives out of the box - untouched
You can't however see files there, edit files, copy files, etc. by any of the thousands of tools made by people to work with files.
- you can extract phar archives and run them - still untouched
To extract them, you again can use one and only one tool, which might not be available on the system you want to open the archive on. That's all consequences of inventing yet another separate packaging format on top of dozens already in existence. Java at least used existing format...
- you can provide phar archives that do not require a phar extension
What do you mean, how? And if you can - why don't you always do so? Why do you need phar extension at all?
To your question "is phar so important that everybody needs it in the main source." I think the above means it should.
Sorry, not clear to me how exactly it means so. There are a lot of extensions that live in PECL and do all kinds of interesting things - why phar is so special?
-- Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Products Engineer [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.zend.com/ -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
