I am the primary author and maintainer of the libcurl library, the
underlying library that supports the PHP extension named... eh, right.
What is the extension called really? CURL? ext/curl? curl?
It's called "CURL extension", I'd say. As there's MySQL extension, Json
extension, DOM extension, SOAP extension - there's CURL extension.
o You call the binding CURL or similar. The heavy mentioning of libcurl in
your docs also tend to make PHP people to believe they actually "use
libcurl".
Don't they?
o There's a huge lack of docs for the PHP binding for libcurl on the
php.net
site. Most options are only listed with their names, so to figure out
exactly what the names mean (and more) they need to search elsewhere.
Missing docs are bad. PHP being open-source community project, it means
nobody did it - and somebody has to step up and do it.
In a (private) conversation with a PHP team member he said the
extension is
called 'ext/curl' but I don't think that's a lot better since that's just
going to be seen as "the extension called curl" to people. And then we're
back on square 0.
ext/curl is the path where the extension resides. As for name for the
extension, there are many names used in different context (as a person
can have first name, last name, email, driver's license number, Skype
ID, Facebook username, a nickname for close friends, other nickname only
parents use, etc.). Usually it is just referred to as curl extension,
unless the context requires different name.
o I've been told by more than one PHP team member that renaming the
extension
in your end is more or less out of the question, so even though I would
It doesn't make sense to name the extension "php/curl" - everything
inside PHP is, well, PHP and no extension ever had php/ prefix in it's
name. It is custom to name extensions by the functional module they
represent. Externally, of course, you can refer to it as PHP/curl but
I'd still suggest to use something like "curl PHP extension" because
most people wouldn't know what is "PHP/CURL".
*really* want that (and no other libcurl binding has hijacked one of our
names like this), I can only see one really good way to solve this
I do not think it is proper to refer to the extension name as
"hijacking". No more than having file named MyApplet.java is a
"hijacking" of the Java language name. The extension name simply refers
to the functional module it implements.
You need to vastly extend the amount of documentation for the PHP
binding for libcurl (I seriously don't know how to refer to it) on your
site to drastically reduce the need for your users to go searching for
the information on other sites, since the very moment they do that they
enter the name- confusion maze and then a large amount of them are lost...
Of course, any help with improving the docs is always welcome.
Unfortunately, writing good docs is not always a strong side of the code
hackers. While I think PHP manual documents functions available
reasonably well, every improvement that can be done to it is most welcome.
--
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.zend.com/
(408)253-8829 MSN: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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