Can you explain to me why this is an improvement over the current package?

Releases (both stable and unstable) are published to github before php.net. With this change, we can test unstable releases sooner. Also we can test 8.0-dev version with this change.

I'm fine with testing unstable packages sooner, but please be cautious about tags being published on github.com: I still remember when PHP 7.0.0 was released (on Dec 03 2015), people wrongly assumed that it was out on Dec 01 2015 since this was the date where the tag was published.

@NixOS/php who can check correct working of this patch:

diff --git a/pkgs/development/interpreters/php/default.nix b/pkgs/development/interpreters/php/default.nix
index 548aaec89cb..1c0fed6b3be 100644
--- a/pkgs/development/interpreters/php/default.nix
+++ b/pkgs/development/interpreters/php/default.nix
@@ -197,12 +197,7 @@ let

           postPatch = ''
             # Don't record the configure flags since this causes unnecessary runtime dependencies
-            for i in main/build-defs.h.in scripts/php-config.in; do
-              substituteInPlace $i \
-                --replace '@CONFIGURE_COMMAND@' '(omitted)' \
-                --replace '@CONFIGURE_OPTIONS@' "" \
-                --replace '@PHP_LDFLAGS@' ""
-            done
+            substituteInPlace main/build-defs.h.in --replace '@CONFIGURE_COMMAND@' '(omitted)'
           '' + lib.optionalString (lib.versionOlder version "7.4") ''
             # https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=79159
             substituteInPlace ./acinclude.m4 --replace "AC_PROG_YACC" "AC_CHECK_PROG(YACC, bison, bison)"
diff --git a/pkgs/top-level/php-packages.nix b/pkgs/top-level/php-packages.nix
index fd372c1e030..b08bd5ba8e6 100644

No build errors.
This code is added in this commit - 64b3974#diff-e3f1a5e8a80452693ffb5de49ae02c5bR251-R258

@Izorkin Actual origin seems to be 94dfd4b, you just linked a refactoring commit.

The file still seems to be there, so it is probably needed.

@jtojnar these changes were done quite a long time ago. Probably something was changed in build process since that time.

be cautious about tags being published on github.com

I totally agree with this. PHP does the official releases with changelogs on their website. Those tarballs are the ones that they say that people should use.

So I'm skeptical to the entire effort due to this.

@GrahamcOfBorg build php73.unwrapped

As a PHP extension developer that uses NixOS, testing against php master has been a pain. Although, personally, I think it would be ideal to fetch the official release tarballs instead of those from GitHub for the actual derivations, it would be very nice for an easy way to override the src with php master from GitHub. I suspect the other changes in the PR are required for that to work correctly?

@jbboehr build option required using tarballs and github sources? Have not tried this way.

cc @NixOS/php

I marked this as stale due to inactivity. → More info

@etu @jtojnar this PR is no longer actual?

Yeah, it is now easy to use a different source as needed, like we did for 8.2:

#201000