Switch to PIE

[cooperotto]

Recently there was an issue with the PECL package server.
#1124

The maintainer of PECL suggested moving to the alternative called PIE
php/web-pecl#105 (comment)

Would it be possible to make the switch? https://github.com/php/pie

[mlocati]

Pie requires PHP 8.1, whereas install-php-extensions supports much older PHP versions (and no, I'm not going to drop support for them).

Maybe we could use pie for PHP 8.1+ and pecl for older versions, but that would require a lot of work, making the script even more complex.

[derickr]

PIE runs on PHP 8.1 and later only, but it can install extensions for older PHP versions.

[mlocati]

PIE runs on PHP 8.1 and later only, but it can install extensions for older PHP versions.

In docker images there is usually only one version of PHP installed.

[mbabker]

Maybe we could use pie for PHP 8.1+ and pecl for older versions, but that would require a lot of work, making the script even more complex.

Perhaps a note on the README indicating that only PECL and Pickle are supported and there are currently no plans to support PIE then? PHP itself is pushing PIE a fair bit (there's now a banner suggesting to use it on the PECL homepage), so I imagine this ask is going to come up more frequently in the future.

If the maintenance burden for all 3 platforms is too much, considering Pickle is abandoned, removing support for that might help going forward.

[derickr]

PECL at some point, is going to go away, with PIE being the replacement. You might not want to do anything about this now, but you will have to in the future.

[Skaronator]

In my opinion it seems beneficial to align the project's support with PHP's official End-of-Life schedule and establish PHP 8.1 as the minimum version.

PHP 8.0 has been EOL since November 2023, and its final release was over two years ago. Continuing to support it adds complexity and prevents the use of modern tools like pie.

Users who are required to stay on unsupported PHP versions can continue to use an older, stable release of this installer.

[shinsenter]

PIE is too big

[jaydrogers]

I'm very interested to hear what others are thinking on this. From what I understand, this is what I am seeing:

Pros of PIE

• It's clearly the future, especially with PECL even posting a deprecation warning on the homepage linking to PIE
• It seems to have more specific control of which versions to install because it uses packagist

Cons of PIE

• It seems to add a lot of bloat (README calls for sudo apt install gcc make autoconf libtool bison re2c pkg-config php-dev to be run)
• It doesn't support older versions of PHP (I totally see both sides of "Well, PHP 7.4 is no longer supported" and "There are enterprises working to upgrade from PHP 7.4")

I really love Michele's work on install-php-extensions. It's very simple to install and it doesn't leave bloat behind. It also was designed from the perspective of a "containerized first" approach (keeping all these best practices of container design in mind).

But I also see that PECL could turn the servers off at anytime now they have the deprecation warning.

Does anyone know if PIE is going to improve their design for containers? Or will we still need some sort of wrapper script like install-php-extensions that will install the build dependencies then clean up after itself?

[mlocati]

Cons of PIE

* It doesn't support older versions of PHP

This is the major problem of pie IMHO.

PS: In my (little) spare time I'm working on a brand new version of install-php-extensions.
Its new features will be:

• written in PHP (compatible with PHP from 5.5 to the latest)
• installable as a composer dependency (so that tools like PIE will be able to use it to install the system dependencies of PHP extensions)
• distributed as a PHAR (so that you'll still be able to download and execute it as you do today)