[RFC]: Drop support for niche serializers MsgPack, PhpCode, PythonPickle and Wddx

[boesing]

RFC

Q	A
Proposed Version(s)	3.0.0
BC Break?	Yes

Goal

Reduce overall complexity of this component by dropping niche serializers.

Background

As this component is used in a bunch of other components, abandoning it is not as easy as I've thought. Due to this, maintaining this component in the future might be relevant and thus, I'd love to drop support for those serializers which seems to fill a niche such as:

• MsgPack
• PhpCode
• PythonPickle
• Wddx

I'd love to focus on IgBinary, Json and PhpSerialize - especially as these are most probably the most popular and mostly used serialization types (just a guess, never used any of those above besides PhpCode which gave me pain due to eval).

Especially wddx seems to not work anymore as you can see by following the commits in #22

Considerations

In case projects are using one of the mentioned serializers above, they might have to integrate the serializers to their projects or switch to one of the still available serializers IgBinary, Json or PhpSerialize.

Due to these changes, other components using this component (such as laminas-cache and all adapters, laminas-hydrator, the doctrine module and a bunch of other components) are unable to use MsgPack, PhpCode, PythonPickle or Wddx.

Proposal(s)

Simply drop the code of these serializers for 4.0 so that the overall maintenance is reduced to the (most probably) mostly used serializers.

Appendix

Especially due to the slight scope of this component (providing two methods via an interface), re-implementing very specific serializers should not be a big deal.

[laminas-bot]

This package is considered feature-complete, and is now in security-only maintenance mode, following a decision by the Technical Steering Committee.
If you have a security issue, please follow our security reporting guidelines.
If you wish to take on the role of maintainer, please nominate yourself

If you are looking for an actively maintained package alternative, we recommend:

• jms/serializer

[boesing]

Keeping PhpCode for now, removal is initiated in #28 and finalized in #27