PHP - bcmath extension is required, but not typically installed by default

[dwsupplee]

Certain bundles come with the bcmath extension, but it is not always included by default. It would be great if we either forced a requirement on this extension in the composer.json, or ideally had a fallback for the case where it is not installed.

An error is triggered with calls to Google\Protobuf\Internal\Message::mergeFromJsonString() (due to bccomp calls), and when using the protobuf C extension a segfault is triggered - making tracing the issue extremely difficult.

This was surfaced from a user reported issue at googleapis/google-cloud-php#950.

[TeBoring]

I'll add a requirement for bcmath

[TeBoring]

Using c extension should not meet this problem.

[TeBoring]

I am thinking whether reporting an error will be more reasonable. Some users are using c extension and others may not use mergeFromJsonString. For these uses, bcmath is not needed.

[dwsupplee]

@TeBoring that sounds fair and would be better than just a hard to trace segfault.

[dwsupplee]

@TeBoring friendly ping :) - is this something still on the radar? This issue can be confusing to our users.

[hackzilla]

I've just run into this problem with bcmath extension not being installed.

Call to undefined function Google\Protobuf\Internal\bccomp()" {"exception":"[object] (Error(code: 0): Call to undefined function Google\\Protobuf\\Internal\\bccomp() at .../vendor/google/protobuf/src/Google/Protobuf/Internal/Message.php:1000

I can see that it was a suggestion but it feels like the extension is required.

composer info google/protobuf
name     : google/protobuf
descrip. : proto library for PHP
keywords : proto
versions : * v3.17.3
type     : library
license  : BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License (BSD-3-Clause) (OSI approved) https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.html#licenseText
homepage : https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/
source   : [git] https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf-php.git ae9282cf11dd2933b7e71a611f9590f07d53d3f3
dist     : [zip] https://api.github.com/repos/protocolbuffers/protobuf-php/zipball/ae9282cf11dd2933b7e71a611f9590f07d53d3f3 ae9282cf11dd2933b7e71a611f9590f07d53d3f3
path     : /var/www/ukwm-feeds.ukwm.co.uk/vendor/google/protobuf
names    : google/protobuf

[alicejli]

I also ran into this issue when testing out the Running Tests section of using the PHP client library generator (which I see referenced in googleapis/google-cloud-php#1812): Specifically, the unit tests failed with the error:

1) Google\Generator\Tests\Unit\ProtoTests\ProtoTest::testGrpcServiceConfig
Error: Call to undefined function Google\Protobuf\Internal\bccomp()

I've updated the documentation there to include a note about this, but curious if there's been any reconsideration of whether we can just include the BCMath extension by default.

[cdcline]

This is a pretty annoying issue if you're trying to setup secrets on the google cloud. The docs don't mention any of this.

[keifgwinn]

We just ran into this using google secrets in google run

[deannagarcia]

Documented in #10490