Lester Caine wrote: > As for phar? It sounds a little like PDO. No one has time to work on the > Firebird PDO driver because we still need the main driver to provide the > functions PDO does not support. Proper discussion and development of > elements that are planned to become main stream would be nice, and not > the apparently current method of 'I'm doing this in the next release > because I want it!' Do we need phar? Is it fully operational on all > platforms? How will the currently registered dependencies be addressed? > IF it goes into the main distribution presumably the installers are > going to be extended to support it's server requirements. Is that > appropriate 'mid cycle'?
Hi Lester, Phar does not require any external dependencies to read .phar files. Optional extension dependencies include SPL and hash. It is fully operational on all platforms because it uses the streams layer to read the underlying .phar file, and it has no "server requirements" It may be helpful to understand where phar came from. I've been happily developing PHP_Archive (http://pear.php.net/PHP_Archive) and using it to package up PEAR releases since PHP 5.2.0 - in production. PHP_Archive relies upon a user stream wrapper to function, but works great. Unfortunately, as of PHP 6, the plan is to mark all user streams as being remote, regardless of what they actually do. Because of this, PHP_Archive will no longer work on *any* system without php.ini changes. This effectively kills the format. The phar extension, being a C-based extension, is allowed to mark itself as a local, non-remote stream, and will therefore still work. Phar has had many extra features added since this original porting of PHP -> C. One of the significant features allows a mapping of a phar to its extracted location on disk. There are plans to implement a simple but effective (optional) front controller function to simplify pharring of web apps. Phar is not yet perfect, but is also not NEARLY as complex as PDO. There is no comparison. Greg -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
