On Fri, Aug 30, 2024, at 9:54 AM, Calvin Buckley wrote:
> On Aug 29, 2024, at 2:49 PM, Christoph M. Becker <cmbecke...@gmx.de> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> it seems to me that we're pulling through ext/snmp without having any
>> real expert of the protocol, let alone of the implementation. The
>> extension has no code owner, and according to EXTENSIONS, it has no
>> primary maintainer for more than ten years. Skimming through the commit
>> log mostly shows general clean-ups and changes. And seeing that there
>> have only two issues been reported on Github[1], I would conclude that
>> either the extension just works as expected, or that it is not used
>> much. A recent doc-bug report[2] makes me believe it's the latter.
>>
>> Personally, I barely know what SNMP is used for, but have no deeper
>> understanding of that protocol, and I can remember that it took me quite
>> a while to work out how to even set up a testing environment on Windows
>> (without understanding the details).
>>
>> So the question is: do we have any SNMP experts (or some who want to
>> become SNMP experts) around, who would want to take a look at the
>> extension and its documentation?
>>
>> [1]
>> <https://github.com/php/php-src/issues?q=is%3Aissue+label%3A%22Extension%3A+snmp%22+is%3Aopen>
>> [2] <https://github.com/php/doc-en/issues/3690>
>>
>> Christoph
>
> I suspect it's not in high use either; Michael's reply suggests that.
> Maybe it could be spun out to PECL if there's a lack of interest in it,
> like imap was?
That probably makes the most sense.
> (stupid speculation follows, people who know the history correct me)
>
> There are a few other extensions like that in ext/. I'm thinking a lot
> of them would have been in PECL or done in userland, but they were at
> the right place in the right time and ended up in ext/ instead. They
> might predate PECL (seems to be the case for SNMP), or wrapped a library
> hat was mature and well-used when it was written (seemed to the case for
> imap).
Yes, ext/snmp probably goes back as far as the PHP 3 days (some guy named
Rasmus was the original author).
Perhaps if the effort from the PHP Foundation to build a next-generation PECL
bears fruit, an even harder look can be taken at migrating out even more of the
extensions still living in the php-src tree. With some robust CI, care could be
made to make sure changes in php-src that impact extensions is noticed and
dealt with, but spinning them out on their own might make them easier for more
people to contribute to and maintain.
Jim
