Since I've gotten involved in this conversation would like to add my opinion to the tally. I too believe that at least at this point, the mbstring extension should not be enabled by default. There are two reasons for this decision:
1) Majority of PHP users do not require this functionality. Most PHP programs are developed with non-multibyte languages in mind and mbstring only adds unnecessary overhead. People who need it can easily enable it or ask their ISPs to enable it, if they had done so already. 2) mbstring extension is a fairly complex piece of code and iirc is the youngest extension of this magnitude that is enabled by default. Although the extension developers are very prompt at fixing bugs, the fact they need to do this fairly frequently, at least to me, implies that the extension is not yet mature enough to be enabled by default. Also, judging by the number of changes in the CVS to the extension, a lot of new functionality was added to the extension recently and has not been tested outside the pre process. Maybe by next PHP release is made, it will be better tested and more stable. Ilia -- PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
