On Wednesday, April 18, 2001, at 03:53 PM, Stig Sæther Bakken wrote:
> [Ron Chmara <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>]
>> "Frank M. Kromann" wrote:
>>> Is there a list of modules that stays ?
>> A proposed list where it "cuts close to the bone":
>> (since nobody seems to want to be the 'bad guy', I'll start...)
>> M= Main
>> P= Pear
>> (To show/expose any personal bias, items marked with a "*" are ones
>> that
>> I use on most servers.)
>>
Major Snip_>
>> pcre P
> PCRE should be in the main distribution, a lot of PEAR code relies on
> it.
Snip Again _>
>> xml P
> *BLAM*
> That's the sound of someone shooting himself in the foot. The PEAR
> installer needs the XML extension. :-)
LOL!
Well, so we've established that for PEAR-based-extensions to work, we
_must_
have some of the /ext's included in the main distribution, as well as
some form
of dependancy checking and resolution.
Looks like we're morping into a PEAR design discussion, in some ways. :-)
>> Which would mean that the main distro would have:
>> apache
>> ftp
> Why ftp, when for example curl is out?
My mental approach was to ask myself what the basic, internet-related,
extensions were, the things likely to be used by a beginner before they
grasped more advanced concepts, so they wouldn't have to learn PEAR
interactions to get started with the bare basics.. That's why I picked
fairly well-known names, packages, and databases. While cURL can
do a _lot_ of things, a newbie trying to ftp, get ldap entires, etc.
might
be more likely to look for functions directly associated with their end
goal.
That was my reasoning. Not neccesarrily the best reasoning, tho. :-)
It assumes a learning curve for PEAR, etc.
Of course, if we have sockets, we don't actually "need" ftp, imap,
ldap... well, just about anything that writes or reads :-) .... but that
makes the
learning curve a bit steeper. Clifflike, even.
>> mssql
>> mysql
>> pgsql
> I'm willing to bet my best cap that oci8 is much more used than mssql.
The reason that I wound up with these three is that I was looking for the
"top two". To compensate for our Win32 users, I added mssql, because
IIRC the pg port was pretty much a cygwin-kind-of-kludgy-thing...
(Of course, the WIn32 users do add a whole new dimension to this....)
Hmmm.... it sure would be nice to have some actual metrics on extension
use,
regardless of what gets put into PEAR.
Do we have any logs on www.php.net/manual page views? Could we use
that in some form to determine extension use (by how frequently an
extensions'
pages get looked up)? It's not survey based, and it's passive enough that
timeframes that we were collecting data on could be hidden from
poll-slamming.
Even if we didn't want to log web hits (in general) for performance
reasons,
(I have no idea if we do) we could at least get a set of numbers unbiased
by personal use/coding styles/etc. by turning it on for a minute or two,
once an hour, for a few days.
>> pspell
> Why?
I guess I use it often enough that I associate it with being as
valuable as any other
form of standard string-validation.
It's the hidden biases (and I guess the above is one of mine) that creep
into
this....
I'd be much happier if we had some metrics on use. Maybe we could also
gather information on number of errata notes for each, opened/closed bugs
for each, and pageviews for each. Those numbers should at least point us
in a few directions, where it gives us an idea of what people are
actually
working with (as compared to just installing, or a web-poll.) Something
that
wasn't too geographically based would be nice, as well, because
application
usage (which interacts with the extensions used) varies from country to
country, timezone to timezone.
-Ronabop
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