I fully agree to that. I (currently) see phar as a means of deploying PHP code. But when people start running PHP apps from a phar, I am sure
Then you don't need any extension - install should run without it quite well.
And, if APC becomes more wide-spread in the future, I guess it does not really matter wether the code is read from filesystem of phar for the
It does. For starters, if you put whole multi-megabyte app in one file, you'd have to either load them all and waste a lot of memory or make bytecode caches implement pseudo-filesystem layer on top of it to do it efficiently. And then there are applications that actually use paths and __FILE__ and whatnot.
the cache anyway. Thus, I see no serious performance impact even if you run software from phar, at least when using a bytecode cache.
Besides performance impact, there's manageability impact. Think of how easy is to work with compiled code as opposed to dynamic language code.
Then, for installation, what other format would you suggest?
For installation - format compatible with existing tools (as most of the vendors already do). For runtime - I don't think running PHP out of the single huge file is a very good idea whatever the format is.
I think one advantage of phar is that it is backed by PEAR tools that
I think it's a disadvantage. With all due respect to the PEAR team and the tools, nobody in the world but PEAR team knows what this format is, and there's tens of years of tools to work with other formats, supported by all OSes and languages in existence. I know it works well in all ten use cases that was considered, but once we recommend it to the wide world, there would be thousands of cases it doesn't work. Unix was built on the principle of interoperability, and inventing private formats not supported by anything violates this principle.
one can expect every PHP developer to have on his system. It would be a good time now to provide some kind of de-facto-standard for deployment of PHP code, and phar is the best candidate I know for this.
I'd say the only one - and I don't think making decision about standard from this position - "we never though of anything better and it just grew as it is so we make it standard" is a good approach. It works for the thing is was built for - distributing PEAR files - but when we talking about PHP-wide policy I don't think we should recommend people
running their applications out of phar files. -- 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
