On November 12, 2002 09:42 pm, Marcus Börger wrote: > At 23:56 12.11.2002, Ilia A. wrote: > >Since I've gotten involved in this conversation would like to add my > > opinion to the tally. I too believe that at least at this point, the > > mbstring extension should not be enabled by default. > >There are two reasons for this decision: > > > >1) Majority of PHP users do not require this functionality. Most PHP > > programs are developed with non-multibyte languages in mind and mbstring > > only adds unnecessary overhead. People who need it can easily enable it > > or ask their ISPs to enable it, if they had done so already. > > NO. Most people do not have the choice and ISPs usually take the default. > If the default is not approriate they do not use it.
Through the course of my work I have to deal with many ISPs from all over the world, of all sizes. In my experience over 60% of ISPs have non-default PHP configuration. And most of the remaining 40% are more then willing to add additional extension(s), especially if those extensions do not require external libraries. Keep in mind most ISPs will not upgrade to 4.3.0 and will most likely wait for a few releases past 4.3.0 to upgrade. > If you read the whole thread you find enough reasons how apps benefit from > mbstring and what could be easily achieved with languages like german. Any extension is useful if it was not the author(s) would not have spent time and effort writing it. The fact it is useful, does not automatically imply we should enable it by default. The question on the agenda wether ever single user who upgrades needs to have mbstring enabled by default. My belief that unless majority of PHP users will benefit from this extension we should not enable it by default. All the arguments in favor had not convinced me that this would be the case. > >2) mbstring extension is a fairly complex piece of code and iirc is the > >youngest extension of this magnitude that is enabled by default. Although > > the extension developers are very prompt at fixing bugs, the fact they > > need to do this fairly frequently, at least to me, implies that the > > extension is not yet mature enough to be enabled by default. Also, > > judging by the number of changes in the CVS to the extension, a lot of > > new functionality was added to the extension recently and has not been > > tested outside the pre process. Maybe by next PHP release is made, it > > will be better tested and more stable. > > > >Ilia > > Ok there are some problems and that is the backside of it: Some of us > implement new functionality and some merge code from the original > development tree. In other words: Maybe we should slow down or even stop > feature development > until 4.3 is out.... After php 4.3 we hope the new implementation can be > used. > > As long as function overloading isn't used there is no harm from mbstring > (disable > is the default). And some extra bytes shouldn't affect anybody today. If > you say > most apps are not designed to use mbstring then it's nice that all those > could try > mbstring which would like to. So we can get feedback. As long as it isn't > default > there will be none or only little feedback. > > The stability is very high and we have many *.phpt tests to help us find > failures > and make it even more stable. mbstring has many dedicated developers whom are doing excellent maintaining and upgrading this extension. Which at the moment makes mbstring very much a work in progress, there is hardly a day without at least one or two CVS commits to it. Since this is a work in progress, it is simply not safe to enable it by default if we want to claim any sort of stability for 4.3.0 release. There is a chance it'll work out, but IMHO there is even a greater chance it will cause problems like it did in 4.2.3 with mangling of POST requests, 4.3.0 will have more then enough new stuff as is. Perhaps by the next major release, mbstring will be a lot more mature and thoroughly tested in production enviroment. At that point we can discuss this issue again and consider whether this extension has merit for most users and based on that decide whether or not to enable it by default. Ilia -- PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
