You Know What Symfony Needs?
Symfony has grown in to a huge beast. It has taken me the best part of 5minutes to check out the latest beta from the subversion server.
This includes things like the Propel 1.4 plugin for database ORM and Doctrine plugin, for database ORM.
For my latest project I’m going to go with Doctrine; I don’t need propel in this instance. I’m sure I’m not going to need a lot of the plugins that come in the core distribution either.
What symfony needs is a downloads builder, similar to that you get on the JQuery UI. You select the components you require, it bundles up the components and their dependencies into a custom ZIP file which only has what you required.
I know it’s the case that at the start of a project, you don’t know what you’ll use prior to the first production release, but you’ll sure know which ORM you’re going to use (Propel or Doctrine, possibly none if it’s a consumer of webservices).
You’re likely to require some form of Authentication & Authorisation. So bung in sfGuard in the appropriate flavour. Propel, Doctrine, LDAP, PAM, etc.
When an application goes into production you would want the whole deployment to be as lean as possible, so based on what you’ve developed, you could build another custom download with everything that you require but none of the other bloat that isn’t required on your production environment.
A somewhat blue sky option could be, based on the coverage of your lime unit/functional tests: a list of what plugins/libraries your system uses and feed that into a custom build/deployment task.