[Phpwiki-talk] Re: Many backends

[Reini U. <ru...@x-...>]

Joel Uckelman schrieb:
> Thus spake Dan Frankowski:
> 
>>See, I completely disagree. Why keep flatfile and cvs and dba? I've seen 
>>Reini wasting time answering people who email the list, "Probably dba is 
>>not installed on your system" etc. Why not just keep ONE of flatfile, 
>>cvs and dba? Why keep all 3? You have not made a strong case.

It's not my primaray goal to answer such support questions.
If I do so, because I don't have nothing better to do. So I wouldn't 
drop database backends just because it needs some of my time for 
answering support questions.
If I don't answer I have more important things to do. As in the last weeks.

> The primary problem with dba is that some Linux distros' default builds of
> PHP no longer come with dba support compiled in. That problem could mostly
> be solved by including a note on how to rebuild PHP with dba support. (It's
> really really easy, if you have a distro with package management.)
> 
> There's a huge performance hit if we force everyone not using an SQL server
> to use flatfile; nor do I think that we want to force everyone to use an SQL
> server. That's why I think we should keep both dba and flatfile.

flatfile is not that slow. it's almost as fast as SQL, if not faster. 
The real problem is the lack of true OS filelocking, which has similar 
problems with certain dba backends (gdbm e.g.) and with pearDB and 
stupid SQL databases (mysql e.g.).
berkeley db is really fine.
gdbm would be theoretically the best, but has a lot of bugs with older 
php's.

> As for the cvs backend, do we have a documented case of anyone using it?
> I wouldn't object to dropping that one if we don't.

I know of nobody using cvs.
It's no major problem keeping it for a while as now, effectively 
unsupported. I don#t really care.
In fact I have almost ported the new php5 cvsclient pecl library as 
WikiDB backend, which is independent of the external cvs binaries.

Much more important is the new PDO backend for PHP5, which is much 
cleaner as PearDB and adodb.
-- 
Reini Urban
http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/home/rurban
http://phpwiki.org