I see the known-good codeset conversion implementation as a *very* good reason to have mbstring enabled by default. (Just look at all the problems with iconv and recode on different systems out there).
I agree that the magic features for lazy programmers (function overloading and transparent encoding) are slightly worrying, but they are disabled by default, and as I have said - I don't use those, but I do use the conversion functions and *that* configuration works just fine. The conversion functions are something that really should be there by default, as it allows people to write portable globalized scripts. Remember that a large majority of users are vhosted and have not control over the build of PHP. By not providing a reliable and portable codeset conversion API, we are holding back "the masses" from writing (and distributing) "killer apps" in PHP. Yes, I can enable mbstring at configure time, and yes, the CJK people can do likewise, but what about the rest of the world running from vhosts when they want to use unicode, quoted-printable, uu-encoding, <name of your favourite encoding here> encodings which are also supported by mbstring? We took the decision to enable it by default; let's not be short-sighted and disable it primarily out of ignorance (no offence intended). I've yet to see someone comment on my suggestions for a practical solution that would shut up both myself and the people advocating disabling it. --Wez. On 11/07/02, "Derick Rethans" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu, 7 Nov 2002, Marcus Boerger wrote: > > > To make php be easier usable in non US-ASCII (127chars) environments > > especially those requiring UCS-2, UTF-8 or other any character mapping > > other than iso-8859-1 or -15 we should more likly try to integrate mbstring > > fully in php. As long as we cannot or want not make it a core component > > such as ext/standard we should enable it by default. > > If people want it they can use --enable-mbstring. I see no reason why it > should be enabled by default as long as it's not fully integrated in the > core. -- PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
