Do the Windows PHP binaries have some sort of "telemetry" nonsense added to them by Microsoft's compiler?

[email protected] Sun, 9 Aug 2020 16:00:59 +0200 (CEST)
Newsgroups php.windows
Message-ID <[email protected]>
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Even though I had been wondering about this for years, it was only very recently that I first learned that it has, up until now, been Microsoft who has sat there and compiled the Windows version of PHP. This made me feel anxious, as I had always assumed for all these years that it was an automated process using gcc on a Unix machine, cross-compiling to Windows.

Never did I even consider that it would actually be using Microsoft's compiler, which costs a ton of money and seems not intended to automate. I've heard horror stories about that compiler injecting some sort of "telemetry" (= spying) stuff into all binaries by default. Has PHP been built with those disabled or enabled? And if they are enabled, what exactly does this "telemetry" entail? Especially after learning that Microsoft had been building the Windows releases, which was never mentioned once anywhere on the site (that I could see), I highly suspect that they would keep that flag very much on, to get juicy developer stats.

And does somebody actually sit and manually compile each new PHP version for Windows? Why is that process not fully automated and done from the same machines that build the other binaries?

And will this process change now that Microsoft no longer wants to do this?

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