In a side note, I remember a discussion about two kinds of manual builds. One including PECL extensions docs and one without them.
Was I dreaming or is this really on the TODO list ? (if so, I already started cooking a patch that adds a --without-pecldoc to ./configure
and hacks manual.xml on the fly just before starting the build.)
It is a difficult question. We have bundled PECL extensions, and so they need to be in the PECL-less manual. Also I doubt there will be a lot of people using the PECL-less version, if we do our *navigation* better. All that is matter is to let the user get to the information quickly. We already have small signs on functions only supported in PHP 5. PECL stuff could be similarly marked, so when popping up in search results and in overview pages, it is all clear that it is not available by default.
Speaking about PHP users, most of them do use PHP on a shared host, where they have no control of the setup. They don't know and they don't care where a certain extension comes from. They have a mixed set of available-by-default and sysadmin-installed extensions, wheverer they came from. Since most probably all of these shared hosts have some kind of extension installed from PECL, the extended manual would be desired by a lot more users anyway.
Goba
