You’ll sometimes see a PHP package hosted in a Github repository with the heading or subtitle “[READ ONLY] Subtree Split”. This indicates that the package is actually copied from another codebase (usually a framework) and is not intended to be worked on separately from that other codebase.

As such, a “subtree split” is not necessarily a sign of an independent package. Using a subtree split to publish a package says to me that the authors’ concentration is on the framework-as-a-whole, not on the package in-and-of- itself.

For example, Symfony does subtree splits for its components, as does Laravel for its Illuminate components. Those packages from the frameworks are not developed independently; they only move forward as part of the whole framework.

In these cases, you often end up with composer.json in the framework origin directories, which is not something I generally expect. Further, the framework subdirectories may have their own src/tests/docs/etc. directories. They are there so that the subtree split can have them available at their own top level, but in the origin framework, it is again something I find unexpected.

I say: if you’re going to advertise independent packages, actually write them independently. Let them be their own thing. Aura has done it that way since its beginning, and Zend Framework converted to that approach in version 3. Then you can compose the truly independent packages into a framework, instead of subtree-splitting your framework into pseudo-independent packages that are still bound to the origin framework development and release process.

Read the Reddit discussion about this post here.

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