On 11/13/07, Sriram Natarajan <Sriram.Natarajan at sun.com> wrote: > HI > Please find an initial DRAFT on the proposed 'PHP5 Feature > Enhancements' that we are planning to integrate within OpenSolaris. > http://wikis.sun.com/download/attachments/10390064/php_more_features.txt
Apologies because it's not directly related to this list but there's a more general concern I would like to raise that's provoked by the addition of more database support. Which is that adding modules to bring in more functionality adds additional dependencies. In particular, adding database support implies a run-time dependency on the libraries associated with that database, which means that any database module you add requires that that database (the runtime, at least) be installed on all systems. Which gets worse as you add support for more database engines. For example, we don't use postgres. Why should I have to have postgres installed on my machines just to make PHP work? Others could make the same argument about mysql. Frankly, I'm not going to install something that requires unnecessary database software to be installed on my systems. (This aside from the problem that half my PHP applications actually want to talk to oracle...) I don't know what the answer to this problem is, apart from a gut feel that having a single version that forcibly pulls in every dependency is wrong. One way would be to supply multiple versions, with subsets of the functionality (so there would be a mysql version, a postgres version, etc.). Solves the problem nicely but introduces a separate set of issues as to how you install, manage, and configure the disparate versions. Another would be to ask whether it's possible to load the functionality on demand rather than have the libraries listed as hard dependencies in libphp5.so. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
