On 12/5/2023 8:45 AM, Derick Rethans wrote:
Hi there!
Within the PHP Foundation, we have been talking for a while as what to
do with PECL, and its website.
The code is old, and hard to maintain. And the database is full of
mojibake. It is also an outdated method of installing things, especially
because userland code is so much easier to handle through Composer.
Through the Sovereign Tech Fund (https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/) the
Foundation has acquired some funding to improve this situation.
Hence, to start of replacing PECL with something applicable for this
decade, we started working on a requirements document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_N0E9xo3jn9aKrIZHIbTYaY5lXw71BpSO6-it4cRpDo
In this first stage, we would like to invite you in commenting on the
document (either inline, or here).
Please keep in mind that this is a requirements document, and should not
contain either design or implementation details. Once we have thought
about these details as well, this will be turned into an RFC.
cheers,
Derick
My only thought about this is that the current PECL ecosystem existed
(and exists) as an "official repository" long before GitHub and other
options existed. The new tool should be able to pull in "unofficial"
packages too that don't depend on going through an approval process. Of
course, warning the user that "installing packages from unofficial
channels is potentially dangerous" before blindly marching forward.
Every extension author would then have to build Windows (and maybe other
OS) binaries themselves and deploy them in their own package
repositories. That might annoy some people and reduce the amount of
Windows support that exists, but the automated Windows PECL build system
has been broken for a VERY long time now, which already makes extension
development for Windows rather difficult.
This approach would largely remove pecl.php.net from the picture. The
only reason for it to continue to exist would be to support older PHP
and also function as an archive. A simple JSON file of official
packages on GitHub (or elsewhere) is all that would be required to
replace the entire PECL website.
I have some suggestions about how to create sane, functional
cross-architecture build profiles when you are ready for that kind of
input. It's a novel/innovative area I've been exploring lately
elsewhere and already produces consistent, reproducible environments for
doing builds.
--
Thomas Hruska
CubicleSoft President
CubicleSoft has over 80 original open source projects and counting.
Plus a couple of commercial/retail products.
What software are you looking to build?
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