Monday, June 18, 2007, 12:03:48 PM, you wrote:
I'm all for pushing PHP5, but I'm not sure I want to take such an extreme stance. As I mentioned in my blog post, let's start by making some features PHP5 only. Like, let's rewrite the aggregator module with PHP5's simplified XML parser API. That's disruptive too, but at least we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot, rather than
I'm against this, personally - I'd much rather see us standardize around an external library like SimplePie.
RSS and Atom parsers are a very very complicated thing, and our parsing issue queue is quite indicative of that. I'd much rather use a library that is /dedicated/ to that task then the parser we currently have.
Especially after Aron's measurements, that show SimplePie being more than 20 times slower than the Drupal's core parser (http://groups.drupal.org/node/4519) I am beginning to lose hope in a one parser for all solution. The said complexity and variety of feed formats and use cases is rather asking for a pluggable architecture where you can chose what parser suits you best.
What if, instead of rewriting aggregator, we simply shove it out of core (ala archive.module) and recommend people use something like Feed Parser or SimpleFeed, both of which use and require SimplePie, both require a healthy dose of loving, and both offer a much stronger API?
In core or not, we I think we need a _common_ solution. Ian just posted it before - I repeat it nevertheless: Aron Novak is working for his SoC project on an aggregation solution that should replace aggregator module in core and provide a fundament for contrib modules. See here: http://groups.drupal.org/rss-aggregation and: http://aggregation.novaak.net Alex -- Alexander Barth Development Seed http://www.developmentseed.org http://www.developmentseed.org/blog lx_barth(skype) alex_b(drupal.org) Tel. 202.250.3633 Fax. 806.214.6218