On Jul 22, 2025, at 6:10 AM, Peter Kokot <p...@php.net> wrote: > > I still think that Oniguruma needs to be bundled to make builds simpler. > Deprecating this part of the mbstring extension will take until PHP 9 to be > able to remove it (at least according to current PHP practices - deprecation > and removal phase). And in the meantime PHP can be at least built with > Oniguruma. Otherwise, there will be a situation where PHP 8.5 will have the > option to enable mbregex functionality, while Oniguruma can't be found in the > distribution packages (not downloadable through packages). If these functions > can be replaced with the PCRE regular expressions, that's fantastic.
I'm not sure if distros will drop oniguruma just yet. It's a reasonably popular dependency, and decrepit libraries are shipped by distros all the time (i.e. c-client...). To say nothing of maintenance being picked up someone.
