Description:
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You will probably not regard this issue as bug and it is something that you are no doubt already aware of but it is a problem that, in our experience, causes no end of confusion and frustration among many users of PHP.

The issue is this:  pretty much every new release of PHP (including a significant number of minor upgrades) requires that all third party extension modules be rebuilt from source.  There doesn?t appear to be any technical reason why this should be the case ? after all, I?ve yet to see a situation where module code has to be changed on upgrade.

This is a huge nuisance ? particularly since many PHP systems these days are either pre-installed in binary form or tend to be distributed as pre-built kits (e.g. Windows).

The requirement to rebuild could be removed by abstracting the data structures used in the PHP API to a higher level ? in much the same was as Microsoft has done with ISAPI extensions to IIS.

Incidentally, I seem to remember the PHP community being up in arms in the early days of Apache v2 when every minor upgrade (2.0.x) required third party Apache modules to be rebuilt ? i.e. the PHP DSO.  In the end the Apache Group capitulated and properly abstracted the API such that a rebuild would only be necessary between _major_ upgrades.  This brings me to another problem with PHP:  there seems to be no way of telling in advance whether or not third party modules will need rebuilding.  Sometimes a minor upgrade will require a module rebuild; sometimes not.

A little more effort and/or rationalization in this area would be much appreciated !