PECL/Core, autoloading and namespaces.

Hi. If this is documented somewhere, please point me there. With recent discussions about getting extensions in or out of Core and out or into PECL, why are ANY extensions part of core? All platforms allow for configuration of allowable extensions, either by compilation, or by config file (ini) changes or by the use of dl (though this can now be restricted within PHP6 AFAIK). From my observations on Experts Exchange, the majority of issues I've seen with extensions is what is require to activate the extension. For *ix users, it is where do they put external supporting libraries or how do they make them available to the extension. Both of these are documentation issues. If PHP was, more or less, reduced to just the scripting parser/executor and extension loader, the actual runtime code would be significantly smaller, memory footprint would be smaller. The downside would be the amount of processing required to activate the extension (loading, initialising, etc). By supplying a default highly recommended extension list or ./configure parameter list you can supply the same start point as the current core. One thing I can think of which would be an serious issue is interdepenedance. If ext_A requires ext_B, I don't know what the consequences would be. But again, a documentation issue to describe dependencies - something like PEAR does maybe. Not in a position to build PHP (still working on it), but how small is PHP without any extensions and what sort of delays exist from loading extensions. Extending the load on demand mechanism (like the userland auto_prepend_file/auto_append_file can be used for autoloading of classes/code libraries/etc) to allow for autoloading of extensions would be useful, only only useful in a non CGI/CLI mode where the list could be maintained as extensions where examined. (Hmmm - not really good enough). I suppose my questions are 1 - What determines core or PECL? 2 - If extensions are moved out of core into PECL, do interdependency problems exist? 3 - Are there any mechanisms for autoloading PECL extensions? 4 - Could namespaces be used as an extension autoloading mechanism? An aside question about namespaces ... If namespaces are namespace::entity is the expected syntax for calling a static method of a namespaced class going to be namespace::class::static_method(); ? Ah. userland COULD automate loading of extensions IF namespace existance could be tested like class's existance. if (!namespace_exists('namespace')) { dl('php_' . namespace . '.dll') } sort of thing. Hmmm. .dll or .so (I think), so we would need a OS specific constant (like DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR / PATH_SEPARATOR) - maybe EXTENSION_EXTENSION (Ha!). Ok, I've taken up enough time with this drivel. If I'm compleletly barking up the wrong tree, then let me know. Regards, Richard Quadling.