Rasmus wrote
> This is solved by people who roll distributions. Debian, Mandrake,
> RedHat, FreeBSD, etc. It is very simple to add new features to an
> existing PHP setup through these binary distributions of PHP, even for
> newbies. Once you know your way around PHP and its build system, you will
> probably want to build you own though. It's not that difficult.
>
Rasmus, I really am concerned if you think that this problem is "solved". In
my own experience, talking to ISPs and developers, this is a major roadblock
to the development of PHP as a platform for both sophisticated solutions on
shared servers, and major mission critical systems.
I felt that the contribution by Dan Harrington was an eloquent description
of the kind of issues that arise. My own ISP is pushing people towards Perl
and Java for precisely this reason, if they want more than the functionality
in the core build of PHP.
Look at it from their point of view. Say, as a customer, you want to use
library X. The ISP looks around and eventually find it lives on a personal
site in Greece or Hungary. Not very confidence inspiring. The ftp on this
site is broken, so they email the author and wait a couple of days before
they can download. The documentation may be thin or non-existent. There is
no guarantee that this library has been tested to work with the release of
PHP they are running, or that it will be maintained in the future. To
install it they have to rebuild their PHP setup. There is, so far as I am
aware, no regression test they can run to be sure they have not broken their
installation for the other 400 customers using the server. Then they have to
take the server down to install the new build. Is it any wonder that they
just say "no"?
Now compare this with Perl or Java, where they simply plug in the new
functionality without any significant risk of breaking their server setup.
All this surely applies with even more force for a corporate IT department
evaluating PHP for a mission critical project.
If you don't agree that this is a major issue that needs to be addressed, I
fear for the future of PHP.
If I was Zend, with a major interest in promoting PHP as a professional
enterprise solution, I would be supporting something like the following:
1) Propose a library documentation standard based, say, on CPAN and get it
adopted by the community
2) Set up a site to act as a central repository for PHP libraries
3) Actively encourage library developers to provide plugin binaries, or do
it for them if need be, at least for the most important libraries
4) Do a regression test for each library once installed, and certify that it
does not break the core PHP application
An initiative of this kind would go some way to helping PHP to catch up with
competitive platforms.
However, judging from this current thread, the development team don't see
this as a priority, so I guess that it won't happen unless the user
community makes a strong case for it.
What do people think?
Geoff Caplan
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