Hi, Pierre Joye wrote: > hi, > > The only fact that you build 5.2 with VC8 means that you apply patches > not present in php 5.2 (eventually in 5.3). Yes, that's true. I include those in the 2nd category of patches we apply. They should have no effect on any user code. I am specifically trying to focus on real pros and cons of Zend Server for the end user, not for someone who's a core developer. These patches 99.9% of the time have either no effect on the user's code, or, if they do, it's for the better because it is some bug fix. > But why would you provide your own binaries with random patches (not a > judgement, only a statement) instead of using PHP binaries? Security? > We do security releases when a librarie is affected. PHP itself has > regular security releases as well. For example, Microsoft uses > php.net's binaries for the Web Platform Installer > (http://www.microsoft.com/web/). First, they are not random. Usually they are very specific hand picked patches that we decide are important enough for our own customers. There's nothing random about it. BTW in most cases these patches are created by Zend employees who fix a bug in PHP specifically because it is important to our customers, commit it, and we then provide an update. Now as for the "why" question, A part of Zend's business is to provide a binary distibution of PHP which is supported and updated by Zend. We need to control patches that go in, libraries that we compile against etc. - exactly because while PHP releases do include critical fixes, sometimes our own customers need a fix that PHP developers do not consider important enough to release (not criticizing, different users have different needs). It happens on almost every release of Zend Server. This is exactly what our customers pay us for. In reality I think that this practice is not very different from how Linux distributions might patch and release some software before there's an upstream release. It happens all the time (and again, this is why some people choose to pay RHEL or Ubuntu). In fact, they do that for PHP as well - so I am not sure why this is so different. > As being both my concerns are to actually see a kind of fork of PHP, > being presented as the only usable binary distributions for windows > and other platforms (and for apache too). We do not present it as such (see first paragraph of my first email in this thread - I specifically say the same setup can be achieved in other ways). We do think it's better than some setups, it would be silly of us not to take pride in what we do - but I don't think we've said it's the only usable way to use PHP on Windows. If you encountered someone from Zend saying that I'd like to know, so I can correct them. Most importantly, it is *not* a fork of PHP. PHP is open source, vendors are free to build binary distributions of it. We have no intentions to start taking development in a different direction. Again, I think it is like saying Debian forks PHP, or most other software they ship. It's just wrong. Actually, forking PHP makes absolutely no business sense for Zend as a company. Seriously, think about it. More work for us, less value to our users, more compatibility headaches - we are trying to minimize those, not the opposite. > As with any distributors who apply custom patches, we do not support > them. However these distributors usually have an issues tracker and > ask their users to report issues there. If they meet a real php bug, > it is then then reported in our tracker. That's common practice. We > will indeed not reject obvious bugs only because the users use ZS. We have a ticketing system and forums, and we have in house developers who can take a bug reported to Zend and work to either fix it or properly report it in bugs.php.net. Do you think an open bug tracker for ZS would make a big difference for your work? Thanks, Shahar. -- Shahar Evron <shahar.e@xxxxxxxx> Product Manager Zend Technologies -- PHP Windows Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
