Comment 12 for bug 191251

Speaking here as a member of Debian php maintainers.

I have read mentioned web pages and nothing has convinced me, that this is more then just proof of concept with no real application in the sensible world.

php5 is a language for creating web pages. Embedding language which a horrible design, constantly changes the API, with no common concept, is just a very bad idea. And I hope Ubuntu will never stray and package php5-embed on it's own, since it's not going to happen in Debian(*).

There is a bunch of other programming languages suited for embedding - lua, python, ruby, even perl. Embedding php5 is just wrong. Don't do it.

Ondrej

* - unless current php maintainers all retire and new maintainers will lost their minds, or we are overruled by technical committee in which case I would probably retire as php maintainer