Zend Guard support

[ezyang]

​Zend Optimizer is an extension to PHP that improves the performance of PHP scripts and permits users to run scripts that have been obfuscated by Zend Guard. There is a fair bit of payware PHP software encoded by this, and users occasionally want to run them on Scripts (see for example RT #1298251).

Zend Optimizer is only available as a binary .so file for x86_64, and furthermore, it is only compatible with PHP 5.2 at the time of writing, so it's kind of not usable (right now) on recent releases of Fedora. However, because we allow loading arbitrary php.ini files, users can simply copy the .so file to a location in their web_scripts and then send zend_extension to that absolute path.

It may be worth scriptsifying the binary .so and placing it in extension_dir (in our case, /usr/lib64/php/modules), thus officially supporting Zend Optimizer through the "zend_extension=ZendOptimizer?.so" flag in a php.ini file. However, this leaves us with an unsatisfying upgrade story when we upgrade PHP.

[ezyang]

Zend released a new product "Zend Guard" which supports obfuscated Scripts on PHP 5.3. This is now a tenable project.

[ezyang]

​http://www.zend.com/en/products/guard/downloads

[achernya]

It looks like supporting Zend Optimizer is going to be impossible--they've just recently released a PHP 5.3 version, and we've moved on to PHP 5.4. I think we're forced to close this ticket as WONTFIX.