The makefile target package.xml needs to obtain the version and stability of the extension. It obtains this information by running a small PHP snippet with the compiled extension loaded. However, this requires the extension to be built before building a PECL package, which is otherwise unnecessary.

Since the update-release-version.php script can obtain the version, it would make sense to unify the process and obtain both version and stability statically from phongo_version.h, removing the need for compiling the extension before building the package.