[horde] How to move forward with foreign code in wicked? (Text_Wiki, Text_Figlet)

[Ralf Lang]

Hello,

recently T. Dannhauer approached me with a loading issue regarding the 
Text_Wiki components in Horde's wicked application.

Turns out we have three different problems

- File in two places: The class loader finds the same class twice in 
/vendor/ and in /web/ because of the symlinking we do. This can be 
solved by not including /web/ in the class loader and further be solved 
by upgrading the way we deliver the /web/ dir. I am still working on 
this but we will move away from symlinking whole apps into the web 
readable folder and instead create stubs which forward requests to the 
actual code in /vendor dir. More on this when it's ready and tested.

- Repeated class names across different text_wiki styles. This is 
something we need to address and which really does not look like horde 
heritage.
Warning: Ambiguous class resolution, "Text_Wiki_Parse_Wikilink2" was 
found 5x: in 
"/var/www/horde-dev/vendor/horde/wicked/lib/Text_Wiki/Text/Wiki/Parse/Creole/Wikilink2.php" 
and 
"/var/www/horde-dev/vendor/horde/wicked/lib/Text_Wiki/Text/Wiki/Parse/Tiki/Wikilink2.php", 
"/var/www/horde-dev/vendor/horde/wicked/lib/Text_Wiki/Text/Wiki/Parse/Mediawiki/Wikilink2.php", 
"/var/www/horde-dev/vendor/horde/wicked/lib/Text_Wiki/Text/Wiki/Parse/Cowiki/Wikilink2.php", 
"/var/www/horde-dev/vendor/horde/wicked/lib/Text_Wiki/Text/Wiki/Parse/Default/Wikilink2.php", 
the first will be used.

- Internalized library code: Text_Wiki, Text_Wiki_* exist as separate 
composer packages pear/text_wiki, pear/text_wiki_* but we also have them 
in our application's code base. I personally would much prefer moving 
them out and either consuming them from upstream or give them a facelift 
as a separate package. We have the same issue with text_figlet. I am not 
sure how responsive upstream is and if they actually would appreciate a 
namespaced, php8.4 ready implementation. In the best case scenario we 
can reduce technical debt.

We have a slightly similar issue with Text_Figlet: pear/Text_Figlet 
exists in github but not on packagist. Multiple clones of 
pear/text_figlet exist, often missing attribution to the original author 
(which I think is not only an unnecessary legal risk but also bad 
style). I really don't feel like we should adopt any random dependency 
into our own code base.

Does anybody have a favorite battle tested figlet library which we can 
just consume instead?