On Jul 4, 2025, at 6:52 PM, Peter Kokot <petk@php.net> wrote:
>
> I'd also suggest deprecating building ext/readline with the Readline library and
> ext/dba with the GDBM library.
>
> These two libraries are released under the GPL-3 license, which is not
> compatible with PHP. In practice this means that PHP linked with GPL-3-licensed
> software should not be distributed, making it impractical for any server
> environment beyond a local testing project. This issue isn't immediately
> obvious, but many packagers need to be aware of it and avoid building with these
> libraries.
>
> ext/readline works fine with the Editline library as an alternative,
> ext/dba works fine with other handlers.
>
> This suggestion would otherwise delay resolving the issue, as it would require
> an RFC vote - something I hoped to avoid in pull requests. But I suppose that's
> how it has to be handled.
To add to this, GDBM also doesn't seem to work with our ext/dba tests;
QDBM did, however.
I ran into this earlier when doing the PPC CI work:
https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/17258#issuecomment-2585405491