hiya,

sorry to jump in a little late here,

On Tuesday 13 May 2008 09:03:08 pm Stanislav Malyshev wrote:
>  > So if you think the multi-path extension_dir= change isn't going to be
>  > accepted to PHP53, I might as well stop right here.
> 
>  I don't know - it depends how broad is the need for it and how other
>  developers perceive it.

just to throw in my 0.02 $LC_MONETARY, it would be really useful to have 
something like this in debian and other php-packaging distributions out 
there.

consider the scenario where a user installs via the package management system 
the php core plus extensions a, b, and c.  they later want to install 
extension d (which is not packaged) via pecl, and update/override extension 
c.

currently what happens is pecl (there's a similar situation with pear btw) 
installs to the same location as the packaged files, creating a rather 
schizophrenic environment where you can't be sure what came from a package 
and what was locally installed.  and further, the next time extension c's 
package is upgraded, the local changes will be lost.

now if there were a multi-extension-dir functionality available, we could do 
something like saying "first check /usr/local/blah, and if that fails, 
check /usr/blah", where the latter is for the debian stuff.  then pecl could 
be set to default to the /usr/local directory, eliminating the problem.  fwiw 
something quite similar is done by perl--i believe it provides 3 directories 
actually: a "perl" directory, a "vendor" directory, and a "site" directory, 
but it's the same concept.


anyway, hope to see something like this down the line!


	sean