Re: This is going to break port building without poudriere!

Hi Alexander.

You understand correctly what I wrote:
* Several master/slave ports can be converted to use subpackages.
* Php is a potential candidate for subpackage adoption
However, I wasn't explicit on the fact that I won't impose subpackages
adoption on anyone.
Specifically, I don't want to convert php into subpackages right away,
there are smaller/easier examples to tackle first.
And in general, the maintainer is the one making the decision, and they can
disagree with me.
An experimental adoption will be considered for lang/php83, existing
versions won't be converted.

As you pointed out, there are two challenges specifically for php:
* moving all extensions (slave ports) to subpackages in lang/php* can
significantly increase build times (for ports users) and its dependency
list (for pkg users)
* the meta php-extensions port is a convenient way create a custom group of
extensions
Php port could be converted into subpackages if and only if we can provide
a similar experience as before.
To do that:
* we would need to add options to enable/disable extensions, in order to
manage build times and dependencies
* we need to provide the similar meta php-extensions package, as it's
largely used

If the maintainer finds out that subpackages are not suitable for php, they
won't be adopted.

Best regards,
pizzamig