add documentation about deb/rpm packages and how to install extensions

[henderkes]

when dependencies update, builds will automatically run the next day: https://github.com/static-php/spc-packages/actions

[You-saku]

[imo]
I learned about pie for the first time.
Is it unnecessary to describe pecl? I feel that pecl is also well-known.

[henderkes]

Pecl is unmaintained and being phased out. Pie is its replacement.

[You-saku]

Thank you your reply.

[henderkes]

I've updated all rpm builds to use gcc with rpmbuild flags. That also means that centos 7 is not in the primary support anymore, because it would have complicated the container setup too much.

I sincerely hope that nobody uses rhel 7 anymore, anyway. The rpm's are still available and will still receive daily updates, but they're built with zig, so no gcc-global-regs performance uplift.

[henderkes]

In light of https://github.com/dunglas/frankenphp-grpc I've added php-zts-grpc to prebuilt extensions. The pecl install takes most users like 30 minutes, so I think it was worth adding.

Fun fact, grpc's source tree (with dependencies) is 200mb larger than all other php extensions (and libraries) we support combined. A shallow clone of the repository is 900mb, a non-shallow clone is 2.9gb.

The list of prebuilt extensions is now:

• amqp
• apcu
• ast
• bcmath
• brotli
• bz2
• calendar
• ctype
• curl
• dba
• dio
• dom
• ds
• ev
• event
• exif
• ffi
• fileinfo
• filter
• ftp
• gd
• gettext
• gmp
• gmssl
• grpc
• iconv
• igbinary
• imagick
• inotify
• intl
• ldap
• libxml
• lz4
• mbregex
• mbstring
• memcache
• memcached
• mongodb
• msgpack
• mysqli
• mysqlnd
• odbc
• opcache
• openssl
• opentelemetry
• parallel
• password-argon2
• pcntl
• pdo
• pdo_mysql
• pdo_odbc
• pdo_pgsql
• pdo_sqlite
• pdo_sqlsrv
• pgsql
• phar
• posix
• protobuf
• rar
• rdkafka
• readline
• redis
• session
• shmop
• simplexml
• sockets
• sodium
• spx
• sqlite3
• sqlsrv
• ssh2
• swoole
• sysvmsg
• sysvsem
• sysvshm
• tidy
• tokenizer
• uuid
• uv
• xdebug
• xhprof
• xlswriter
• xml
• xmlreader
• xmlwriter
• xsl
• xz
• yac
• yaml
• zip
• zlib
• zstd

[henderkes]

Added: simdjson, sappy, soap. Total precompiled extension count is now 95.

[henderkes]

Everything but repodata (we want new versions to be available immediately) is cached by cloudflare now. I've also allocated 100gb extra to keep more older versions in case users wish to revert. Thinking about keeping the last 5 versions.

I'm not sure how to do that for deb packages, they're rebuilt to the latest version every time. This is in line with ondrej's repo, though, so I don't think it's a priority to change.

[henderkes]

PHP 8.5 beta 3 is available for everything but x86_64/EL 9 now, there's a bug report open here: ziglang/zig#25415 (comment)

8.5+ will be compiled with Clang, because the new tailcall VM actually outspeeds the hybrid VM by 5-10% (no lto/with lto). Arnaud is to thank for that.

Edit: available on RHEL 9/x86_64 now too.