Comment 3 for bug 423872

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Scott Kitterman<email address hidden> wrote:
> What is PHP upstream's position on this?  Why isn't it shipped as part of PHP?

Good questions - keep them coming!

Perhaps these concerns are about official support to help understand
risks of incompatibilities / breakages / lack of support in future?
So i can answer better in a more round-about way:

The php-sapi (the frontend API interface part of php) is very mature
now. It allows for FPM to be very well isolated from the php
interpreter. Indeed for FPM we aren't patching even a single php
source file anymore. (instead FPM will links against the php library
object files). Php SAPI interface is what FPM implements (as a
replacement to the fcgi part of php). This is a mature area of the
source code for some years its changed little / infrequently. Even
today we are in a ready position for PHP5.3, and PHP6 because these
future versions are known to keep the same sapi interface.

From what i can gather there was a direction taken after a meeting
with the PHP/PECL developers. The author of the FPM SAPI (Andrei
Nigmatulin) felt confident that keeping FPM remain a standalone
companion to php was the most effective way to maintain the FPM SAPI
code into the future. And after examining his code a little, we can
see the reasoning. For more information / discussion about this topic
it may be best to contact Andrei Nigmatulin (direct gmail, and/or
subscribe aknight). And I'll be on the MOTU irc channel the rest of
today for any more questions fielded my way.