Hypothetical php-extras srpm: what to include

[Michael A. Peters]

On Wed, 2005-10-05 at 19:00 +0400, Dmitry Butskoy wrote:
> There is a lot of disabled modules in the current FC's PHP. They exist 
> in the source, but are not built. Some of them seems to be good 
> candidates to be included into FE.

They are good candidates if there is demand for them - IE if there are
web apps that use them, or they provide really useful functionality.

I use to work for a LAMP vendor that packaged some php modules, the
extra modules really weren't that much of a selling point.

readline I believe was one that some packages out there wanted.
pdf was as well - but the license was weird - at least the one that used
libpdf (or pdflib). The one the used ClibPDF we didn't ship.

The swf flash one never worked too well, perhaps it works better now?
I believe it depends upon a library that has patent issues.

cyrus is useful at some installation points.

Adding a php module from source when a user needs one isn't too
difficult, but if someone is willing to maintain them including security
patches - I say go for it, that makes it even easier.
> 
> 
> Initially, I wanted to make php-mcrypt and php-mhash packages only. But 
> as they have common (identical) php's  tar.gz in the source, it has led 
> to idea to have one common SRPM (named "php-extras"), with an 
> appropriate number of binary subpackages ("php-mcrypt", "php-mhash", 
> etc.). And so, it would be useful to build another subpackages the same 
> way (additionally to mcrypt/mhash in my case).

It's definitely better to do it with subpackages if they share a common
source.

> 
> What additional modules are reasonable to be included into FE such a 
> way? (see the list above).

I personally really can't say - swf would be desired if it works *and*
is free of legal license issues. I thought I saw something about
generating MathML via php somewhere, not sure if that is in the php
source or was someones external project - but that would nice if there
was such a module.