Drop PclZip in favor of built-on ZipArchive about phpspreadsheet

[PowerKiKi]

composer is now mandatory since 035281f, so we can go ahead with this feature too.

[Progi1984]

The solution that I use in PhpPresentation is the Zip Adapter of PHPOffice\Common :

• Common : https://github.com/PHPOffice/Common/tree/develop/src/Common/Adapter/Zip
• Use in PhpPresentation : https://github.com/PHPOffice/PHPPresentation/blob/develop/src/PhpPresentation/Writer/ODPresentation/Pictures.php#L24

[PowerKiKi]

@Progi1984, @Quix0r, I had a look at Common's ZipInterface and even though I did prepare a PR to complete the features needed for PhpSpreadsheet, I must say that I am a bit unsure whether this is the right way do to it.

First of all, I noticed that PhpPresentation has a hard dependency on ZipArchive via composer ("ext-zip": "*"). And this is very clearly the case since all readers use new ZipArchive() instead of the ZipInterface. That explains why ZipInterface has no methods to read anything (but only write). So why is done that way in PhpPresentation ?

Secondly, using ZipInterface instead of ZipArchive is a slight overhead in complexity of code and reduce the features we can use since PclZip cannot (easily) replicate everything that ZipArchive does. So the question here is why should we do more work to be more limited ? what is the added value of using ZipInterface ?

Finally PclZip seems to be a dying project. It is only available via an unofficial fork, which was never updated since the first commit 3 years ago, who is possibly out of sync for the last 2 years, whose PR were never addressed at all, and who happen to be incompatible with PHP 7.1. Oh, and the latest official news is from 7 years ago. So I am really wondering why should we keep supporting this old tech ?

[andyinabox]

Maybe it would be a good idea to list dependencies on the main README file?

[Quix0r]

That what @Progi1984 recommends is are more flexible solution, rather than hard-coded ZipArchive code.

[PowerKiKi]

I tend to agree, but that implies that composer becomes mandatory. While I don't think it matters, since composer is so common nowaday, I believe @MarkBaker wanted to keep a version without composer (hence the custom autoloader).

[Quix0r]

I found this here:
http://phpzip.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/phpzip/pclzip/

Even more older, sad to see that so much progress is dying because of lack of interest/time/what ever. Yeah, same with my projects like mailer. :-(

[agopaul]

At this point, I think the question is how much the library (PhpSpreadsheet) should be portable.

On Ubuntu the zip extension in not bundled with the PHP package but, like most extensions, it has its own package. So a "stock" LAMP installation doesn't have the zip extension installed, but when working on PHP projects, using extensions is almost inevitable. I don't know if the extension is bundled with PHP in other Linux distros and on other OSes.

Shared hosting is the only context where PHP extensions are tricky because, of course, you can't install them if they're missing. But shared hosts usually come with all the most common extensions already installed (eg: gd2, soap, zip, etc.)

I think that support for PclZip should probably be dropped otherwise the only solution would be to create and support a fork of it, but that would require additional resources and energy to maintain a library which apparently throws notice errors with the latest PHP version.

[PowerKiKi]

Thanks all for offering your opinions. In the past 6 months, nobody offered strong argument to keep PclZip. It seems dropping it is acceptable and so it was done.

[andyinabox]

So just to clarify — does this mean that if I don't have the zip extension installed (and can't install it) I'm out of luck?

[PowerKiKi]

yes, this is enforced by composer. You won't be able to install PhpSpreadsheet if you don't have all required extensions.

[andyinabox]

Oh I see -- guess I unintentionally found a loophole; I'm serving the site from a VM using vagrant but did the composer install on the host machine. :/

[PowerKiKi]

The README will stay as concise as possible, to avoid duplication of information. This particular requirement is already listed in the install instructions. So there is nothing to do.