Tonight’s work was polishing maintaina’s version of horde/yaml. The test suite and the CI jobs now run successfully both on PHP 7.4 and PHP 8.1. The usual bits of upgrading, you might say.
However, I had my eye on horde/yaml for a reason. I wanted to use it as part of my improvements to the horde composer plugin. Composer famously has been rejecting reading any yaml files for roughly a decade so I need to roll my own yaml reader if I want to deal with horde’s changelog, project definition and a few other files. I wanted to keep the footprint small though, not install half a framework along with the installer utility.
You never walk alone – There is no singular in horde
The library used to pull in quite a zoo of horde friends and I wondered why exactly. The answer was quite surprising. There is no singular in horde. Almost none of the packages can be installed without at least one dependency. In detail, horde/yaml pulled in horde/util because it used exactly one static method in exactly one place. It turned out while that method is powerful and has many use cases, it was used in a way that resulted in a very simple call to a PHP builtin function. I decided whenever the library is not around I will directly call that function and lose whatever benefits the other library might grant over this. This pattern is called graceful degradation. If a feature is missing, deliver the next best available alternative rather than just give up and fail. The util library kept installing although the yaml parser no longer needed it. The parser still depended on the horde/exception package which in turn depended on horde/translation and a few other helpers. Finally horde/test also depended on horde/util. It was time to allow a way out. While all of these are installed in any horde centric use case, anybody who wants only a neat little yaml parser would be very unhappy about that dependency crowd.
Alternative exceptions
The library already used native PHP exceptions in many places but wrapped Horde exceptions for some more intricate cases. While this is all desirable, we can also do without it. If the horde/exception package is available, it will be used. Otherwise one of the builtin exceptions is raised instead. This required to update the test suite to make it run correctly either way. But what is the point if the test suite will install horde/util anyway?
Running tests without horde/test unless it is available
I noticed none of the tests really depended on horde/test functionality. Only some glue code for utilities like the horde/test runner or horde/components really did anything useful. I decided to change the bootstrap code so that it would not outright fail if horde/test was not around. Now the library can be tested by an external phpunit installation, phar or whatever. It does not even need a “composer install” run, only a “composer dump-autoload --dev” to build the autoloader file.
A standalone yaml parser
The final result is a horde/yaml that still provides all integrations when run together with its peer libraries but can be used as a standalone yaml parser if that is desirable. I hope this helps make the package more popular outside the horde context.
Lessons learned
Sometimes less is more. Factoring out aspects for reuse is good. Factoring out aspects into all-powerful utility libraries like “util”, “support” and the likes can glue an otherwise self contained piece of software together with too many other things. That makes them less attractive and harder to work with. Gracefully running nevertheless is one part. The other is redesigning said packages which cover too many aspects at once. This is a topic for another article in another night though.