Armel FAUVEAU, editor of PHPIndex, a french “news” site posted a rant about the lack of good search engines useable with PHP. As the subject can be interesting, the way it was presented was everything you want but helpfull and constructive.

I was disappointed to read the following sentences in a site dedicated to PHP, and supposely knows what they are talking about. Obviously they don’t.

Après tout PECL est, à mes yeux, tout à fait comparable à une énorme poubelle à extension

PECL est comparable, au pire à une sorte de purgatoire pour extensions désormais jugées inutiles, obsolètes, sans avenir ou plus du tout supportées, au mieux à un…musée

Is PECL really a trashcan or a museum? Can we seriously consider PDO, APC, SDO, http or zip as rubishes? No, definitivally no.

Except the engines improvements, most if not all innovations in PHP come from PECL. Many high quality packages are available only in PECL and will certainly never be in PHP releases, memcache colorer for example.

I think everyone will agree that PECL is one of the most important source of innovation for PHP.

One point I could agree with him is about the extensions we moved out from PHP. There is many reasons to move an extension out of PHP, lack of maintainers or being superseded by another extension are the important ones. We should really show their status on the pecl website. As well as clearly state it in the documentation.

The source of his troubles seem to be mnogosearch, which has been moved to PECL before 5.1.0. But no bug report neither a single mail to the pecl developer list or internals. That’s the best way to do not get anything fixed. You want to get back an extension or want a better version? Report bugs! If you don’t do it you do not even have the rights to whine.

For those interested about mnogosearch, I decided to take temporally the hand and try to provide a minimum support for it. I did not release it through pecl simply because I lack the time to do it correctly.

If you have any issues or troubles, feel free to mail the pecl developer list or report bugs. That’s the best way to get things done.

ps: was supposed to be a comment but it seems that it is not desired there to publish other oppinions