I would say that module requirements and minimum PHP 5 version requirements that aim to improve performance and reduce module code are arguably beneficial in that they force developers/users to look for quality hosting rather than RASH (nice one Boris, hehe).
Also, when a module is capable of coping with anything by using very slow, inefficient and somewhat non-guaranteed techniques to "make do" then many lazy developers will just plug these modules in without really putting any effort to install the performance boosting "optional" components, and when these very less-than-optimal techniques fail on some crappy feeds it gets your issue queue filled with garbage. Not to mention giving the false impression to anyone who's examining the site that the module is crappy, not the developer who used it. By requiring PHP 5 and CURL support I minimized the number of issues I got. I realize this is a shady area and my argument might not always hold true.
I agree with you here Boris, I should find a better way of storing these authentication passwords. MD5 and SHA1 both offer one way encryption so they won't help. mcrypt came to mind but it requires some additional libraries on a Linux machine. I wonder if someone stumbled on PHP code that would provide a simple 2-way encryption/decryption or has any ideas that would help here?
On 6/20/07, Boris Mann <boris@bryght.com> wrote:
On 6/20/07, Sean Robertson <
seanr@ngpsoftware.com> wrote:
Curl is frequently not available. I've had to have it installed a few
times, but a LOT of people won't even have that as an option
This is another one of those "must be pluggable" or "fallback" areas. For random ass shared hosting (hereafter known as RASH), we can't necessarily support high performance aggregation of content.
For sites that do need high performance aggregation of content, they will have control over their environment.
And re: curl handling authenticated feeds -- storing user + pass in the database in cleartext as part of the feed URL is not really a great solution.....
drupal_socket_request with plugins for different things? Interesting thought....