should installing a specific commit hash really be supported ?

[stof]

php/pie#24 has added support for installing a specific commit hash (on Unix systems built from source, not on Windows) by taking inspiration from Composer.

However, Composer itself considers this feature as a legacy artifact (it was added in Composer at a time partial updates were not supported, as a poor-man workaround) that is not supported anymore (see the note in the documentation saying that bug reports about this feature won't be accepted).

Should a new tool like PIE really add the equivalent feature, especially when it works only on some platforms ?

[asgrim]

Good question; I don't have an answer right now. Installing a specific commit is indeed quite an edge case, but it is something I've used a few times with Composer. I suppose it depends on whether it becomes a maintenance burden or not in PIE, or if Composer pulls the plug upstream on what PIE's implementation relies on 😁

[stof]

The main drawback of this notation in Composer (I cannot talk about how they translate in PIE) is that Composer will still use metadata from the version provided before the #, not from the specified commit, as it has no way to get arbitrary metadata. This impacts the list of requirements, but also autoloading rules.
In the case of PIE, I assume this would impact the php-ext config