Peter Thanks for your comments. Please see my response inline. Peter Tribble wrote: > On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 1:35 AM, Sriram Natarajan > <Sriram.Natarajan at sun.com> wrote: > >> Hi >> I was wondering, if you could take few minutes and run through this >> (pre alpha) ARC draft of my upcoming PHP 5.2.6 integration within >> OpenSolaris and let me know as to what you think . >> http://wikis.sun.com/download/attachments/10390064/php-526-arc-pre-draft-v1.txt >> >> In nutshell, PHP 5.2.6 integration brings in the following changes >> >> - Includes extensions like Imap and SNMP as well as pear/pecl support. >> - Files are now delivered under /usr/php/5.2 (runtime), /var/php/5.2 >> (for pear/pecl) and /etc/php/5.2 (for configuration) >> > > The snmp extension requires (I believe) net-snmp. You don't call this out as a > dependency. > Thanks for catching this. I will update the draft. Net-SNMP is delivered within SUNWsmagt package. Considering that this additional dependency is not introducing a huge amount of download foot print or complexity to install, I would like to consider bundling within the core package. Any particular reason that you would rather not prefer SUNWmagt package to be included within 'php' (meta cluster for IPS) ? > Given that customers may choose to not install net-snmp, should the snmp > extension be packaged separately? > Please note that customers using OpenSolaris Community edition will have all these packages installed by default. So, this should not be a problem for them. However, Indiana (officially known as OpenSolaris 2008.05/11) customers will use IPS meta cluster (say php) to get our packages installed and this meta cluster can also include SUNWmagt besides other dependencies like 'curl, tidy' etc.
One can argue that it is nice to distribute each individual extension in a separate package (there by reducing the dependency on core runtime package) but it introduces a huge maintenance headache for both customers as well as developers to ensure that every extension that a developer wants is installed on the production system. Rather, I would like to keep things simple by bundling all simple extensions (which does not warrant lot of external dependencies) within SUNWphp52u (core) package. My current reasoning to split an extension into a separate packages is the additional foot print and complexity to install this (php) extension and its dependencies on a customer's system. Based on this reasoning, MySQL and PostgreSQL extensions are delivered as sepatate packages. Also, with the same reasoning, 'memcache' extension is bundled within php core. With respect to 'memcache' php extension - it requires SUNWmemcached and libevent packages as dependencies. However, these packages are straightforward runtime libraries . Hence, I decided to include within the core package. However, I do agree that some customers might not need these extensions but still be forced to install these additional packages on their system. This might be an additional overhead. Af course, customers will always have the choice to disable individual extensions within php core (if they wish to) by editing corresponding ini files found under /etc/php/conf.d directory. Af course, I am interested in your's as well as other customers feedback on the best thing to do for our customers. Do you forsee any issues with this approach ? thanks Sriram
