On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 9:52 AM, Anatol Belski <[email protected]> wrote:
>> If this patch is included in PHP 5.6 I think it is very likely that many
>> extensions will not be updated or take a long while in updating. It's one
>> thing to add two or three new ifdefs to support a new PHP release and
>> something entirely else to change virtually all types in your code and
>> verify that it is still safe with the new sizes.
> I think it depends on how active an extension is supported and developed.
> For instance on PECL are still some extensions not even been ported to
> PHP5. From the todays experience, a port to the current patch might take
> from 3 hours to 3 days, depending on complexity. Say 3 days vs 5 months
> until final, together with the porting docs and tools, most of the really
> active and being in demand extensions will be so far or users will tear
> the devs apart :)
>
If zpp/error_docref/*printf compatibility is not kept it will take a
long time to update pecl extensions, and risk epic failure in the
future when continuing the work on the extensions
zpp (COMPAT ? "zyx" : "xyz", &foo, &bar, &baz) will in 1year turn
into
zpp (COMPAT ? "zyx|xz" : "xyz|z", &foo, &bar, &baz, &meh) and
work
just fine.. until you hit the perfect storm
Its easy to migrate php-src exts since they don't have to care about
compatibility with multiple php versions, but needing to support 5.3,
5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 5.7, 6.0 in a pecl extension will be nightmare
Also, keep in mind most developers priority is not to work on
supporting unreleased versions of PHP, but to keep maintaining the ext
and adding features - so even though the guesstimate 5months "until
final" is true, the extensions won't be updated until 5months _after_
5.6.0 is out.
-Hannes