Re: [Astlinux-devel] Character encoding support for PHP

[Lonnie A. <li...@lo...>]

Hi Michael,

I fully understand what you are asking.

AstLinux is not intended to be a PHP development platform, we enable only a minimal number of PHP modules and minimal supporting libraries.

As noted in the first of "AstLinux Principles:" [1]
"Minimize code bloat, only include the necessary packages and build those packages with unused features disabled."

Not only does this keep the image small, but vulnerabilities in code we don't enable won't hurt us.

As such, we are not inclined to enable "UTF-8" and "Unicode properties" support in libpcre.


AstLinux is GPL open source, you can enable this yourself, for example David Kerr (Github @dkerr64) has maintained a 'develop' branch of AstLinux [2] for his use with added features.  David had done this for quite some time and he stated the latest major merge with AstLinux 1.5.x went smoothly.

Possibly you have outgrown AstLinux and need a more complete development platform, like Debian.

Or, develop using custom crafted PHP code supporting the minimal PHP AstLinux provides.

Lonnie

[1] https://www.astlinux-project.org/about.html

[2] https://github.com/dkerr64/astlinux/tree/develop




> On Mar 23, 2023, at 7:40 PM, Michael Knill <mic...@ip...> wrote:
> 
> Hi Devs
> 
> As we are using more and more PHP libraries for our web interface and respective integrations, we’re finding that certain PHP packages (i.e. iconv) seem to be a requirement for many of these libraries.
>  
> The following are some of the libraries that we are having issues with:
> 	• https://github.com/Adldap2/Adldap2 (elegant library to work with LDAP which we will now be using more and more)
> 	• https://github.com/guzzle/guzzle (would make working with APIs far more intuitive rather than using raw PHP curl functions)
> 	• https://github.com/parsecsv/parsecsv-for-php (I understand that CSV importing is entirely possible with raw PHP functions but parsing CSVs with multiline text and non-askii character encodings breaks the import – this library handles things very nicely)
> 	• We use Mailgun and Twilio integration which can make use of the above libraries
> 	• A number of other libraries that we’ve attempted using in the past
>  
> The primary issue that we get in attempting to use the above libraries is that iconv or mbstring is required (to convert character encodings). In addition, we often get the following error:
> Compilation failed: this version of PCRE is compiled without UTF support
>  
> What we have also found is that if PCRE is compiled with UTF support, we can use a Polyfill to accommodate iconv: https://github.com/symfony/polyfill-iconv
> In other words, we should be able to get away with just having PCRE compiled with UTF support even without having iconv (although iconv would be ideal).
>  
> UTF-8 is a very common character encoding and not having PCRE support for it has proved to be very problematic.
>  
> Would it be possible to compile PCRE with UTF support in the standard Astlinux build?
>  
> Regards
> Michael Knill
>  
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