[mapserver-dev] RFC 117 Question

[Jeff McKenna]

Hi SteveW,

As we had discussed during the PSC meeting and noted in the RFC, the 
goal here is to move to a long-term supported method for supporting PHP 
in MapServer.  The timing is good in that SWIG now fully supports PHP 7, 
and, also the (unwritten) factor in Open communities: someone cares 
enough to propose this to the MapServer PSC - willing to do initial 
builds, testing, documentation (adding it to the migration guides, as 
mentioned in RFC and your message), and managing contributions to the code.

It sounds like you are searching for more documented history, which is 
fine, but at some point we must get moving: release, get feedback & 
contributions, & improve.  From the number of devs offering their 
support through the ticket, it sounds like many are waiting to get their 
hands on some PHP7 support, and then add to it.  We already have several 
mapscripts handled by SWIG, and they have each 'extended' their own 
custom objects and methods (which will also come into our PHP SWIG over 
time).

We cannot guarantee that everyone's existing PHP applications will work 
perfectly after an upgrade, but we can test, document the changes 
needed, and call for contributions to improve the compatibility support.

Regarding the next steps: I did wait until the code sprint, as you can 
see, so, on Monday I'll bring this to a vote to the PSC through email, 
and give a 4-business-day voting period (longer than the normal 2 days, 
to accommodate the chaos of a code sprint).  There is nothing like a 
vote on an RFC to get feedback.

Thanks,

-jeff



On 2017-01-19 11:46 AM, Stephen Woodbridge wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> We discussed RFC 117: PHP 7 MapScript Support Through SWIG [1] and had a
> question.
>
> PHP mapscript has historically been a custom interface where the other
> mapscript flavors have been SWIG based. There was discussion in the past
> about converting PHP to use SWIG, but that didn't at the time move
> forward for some reason(s) like:
>
> * SWIG had issues with PHP?
> * moving to SWIG would break exisiting PHP mapscript applications
> * others?
>
> So my question is are these still issues?
>
> With the release 7.0 we can have breaking changes, but they should be
> documented in the migration guide if needed.
>
> Since I have not read and major discussion on this, my presumption is
> that this is no longer an issue.
>
> -Steve W
>
> [1] http://mapserver.org/development/rfc/ms-rfc-117.html
>