On 08/02/2011 06:25 PM, Hannes Landeholm wrote: > I have no problem compiling extensions and I also don't have any > customers on share hosting. Although it wastes a bit more of my time > I'm personally fine with PECL. I'm contributing to open source though > so I'm concerned with the users that won't be able to run my code > because they can't install PECL extensions. I'm also worried that it > will takes years for WR to be moved to the core and that nobody will > notice or use it. PHP deserves weak references. Not in a year but > today.
Honestly, pecl is kind of self-selecting. APC is installed on millions of servers and it lives in pecl. It is installed everywhere because it is an extremely useful extension and distros tend to package it up promptly for that reason as well. If weak references is a highly desirable feature that will make every complex framework use less memory, then I don't see why it wouldn't follow APC's path and end up on millions of servers. Note also that there are distros that unbundle core extensions and move them into separate packages which makes them indistinguishable from pecl extensions as far as the user is concerned. Realistically, very few end users are installing from the php.net sources. Just about everyone installs their distro's version of PHP with whatever extensions the distro maintainer has decided to include by default. The major frameworks/CMS systems are also packaged up and carry along dependencies which sometimes includes extension packages. So again, the line between core and pecl is very fuzzy here since you could easily have your framework have a dependency on a pecl extension. And the final point is that large shared hosting farms is kind of old fashioned these days. Modern hosting is done with dedicated machine slices, but there are of course a lot of these legacy shared hosting farms around. But, given these are legacy systems they are not likely to rush to upgrade to 5.4 and by the time 5.4 becomes prevalent how many users are really still going to be on a shared web server config? I think the only valid point for putting this in core is that it does feel more like a core feature than a pecl add-on. However, a number of us are uncomfortable with the impact of it and would like to understand better how people other than yourself would use it, or more likely, mis-use it. -Rasmus -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
