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Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2019 09:29:27 -0400
Message-ID: <CAPKYkKzKRqivoj7Pcq9E4CY8xqY=D36jOpM38SYscbxEGdpKPg@mail.gmail.com>
To: Kalle Sommer Nielsen <kalle@php.net>
Cc: Jason Wharton <jason@jwharton.com>, Helen Borrie <helebor@tpg.com.au>, 
	Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: PHP (ext/interbase) driver maintenance
From: chasepeeler@gmail.com (Chase Peeler)

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On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 8:12 AM Kalle Sommer Nielsen <kalle@php.net> wrote:

> Hi
>
> Discussions regarding PHP should be in the public and on the PHP
> internals mailing lists, not in private so I'm forwarding this email
> to its proper place.
>
> Den tir. 16. apr. 2019 kl. 02.40 skrev Jason Wharton <jason@jwharton.com>:
> > I would like to introduce myself as the newly elected President of the
> > Firebird Foundation.  One of the major motivations I had in running for
> this
> > office was to do all I could to increase the usability of Firebird for as
> > many languages and platforms as possible.  I seek to have you reconsider
> > demoting our driver from the core to the PECL.
>
> Not once has the fact that an extension exists in PECL instead of core
prevented me from utilizing that extension. The only thing that has ever
prevented me from using an extension is when it is not maintained. I've
been following this entire thread, and I have yet to see what the big deal
about having the extension moved to PECL is. If anything, being in PECL
gives you MORE flexibility as you aren't tied to the PHP release cycle.


> As the original RFC author of this RFC, I will give reply with my
> thoughts here inline, and while I'm a Core Developer of PHP, I cannot
> speak for every single developer of the team as they are entitled to
> their own opinion, so I will make it as abstract as I can; Based on
> reading this email (along with the many others I have gotten after I
> initially proposed the RFC), it strikes me first that the Firebird
> community does not seem to understand a few things, while they have
> been iterated over and over again on the mailing lists in the last
> month or so, I will try my best to do so again.
>
> Reading your email at first gives me the impression that you may not
> have read the RFC or understand it from the technical perspective as
> it was presented. The ext/interbase extension was designed almost 20
> years ago, it has barely changed since then and was originally
> targeting InterBase before Firebird was created. As a bonus the
> extension was able to connect to Firebird as the protocol is mostly
> the same, requiring very few changes to make the extension work with a
> Firebird backend, which itself is great. However, the problem
> mentioned in the RFC[1], and further explained in there[2] is that we
> had no one to step up and maintain the extension. It was even blindly
> ported to PHP7 which in terms spawned the notorious bug #72175[3], we
> called out for maintainers multiple times[4][5][6] (and further
> mentions of it being broken here[7][8]), I could probably dig out more
> but already this list should be a red flag indicator. We had some
> maintainers step up in the past to try work out the issues of this
> extension, but they have either never touched it or went missing after
> a while (also mentioned in the RFC[9]).
>
> What baffles me in this whole debate is the lack of communication from
> Firebird's side. I could not find any article posted or a relevant
> mailing list or similar where it shows the Firebird Foundation's
> commitment into investing time into Drivers, I could however find the
> article posted on your website in january[10], claiming that you have
> found a maintainer for the extension, which is great, however it lacks
> one major detail. No one from Firebird has been in contact with PHP in
> regards to this (I cannot stress how important this one is!), there
> has been no patches, bug reports or even the slightest communication.
> Even the new "maintainer" was not subscribed to PHP internals. The
> extension and its code is essentially owned by PHP and for a third
> party organization to claim maintainership of something we distribute
> in PHP without any communication sounds more like a fork to me, which
> is very poor execution from Firebirds side of things.
>
> It was first when the proposal to move the extension out of php-src
> came into the light that this was even relayed to PHP internals. I
> explained to Martin (the new claimed maintainer) that I wanted to see
> concrete patches before the time period of when the voting was
> supposed to begin to even remotely consider holding it off and that
> similar to this, I do not appreciate conversations in private, they
> belong to the public, more than ever especially now. I did not see
> any, or even hear any further plans for what the idea with this whole
> thing was and still to this moment of writing this response, I am in
> the unclear of the direction of this "development" and to prevent my
> fellow team members and contributors of PHP the burden of acting like
> we actively maintain something which we don't, push it forward and
> into PECL.
>
> Moving an extension to PECL does not mean its gone for good. It means
> that the extension is not maintained by the PHP Development Team in a
> sense that we do not provide fixes in any capacity as apart of the
> standard release cycle. PHP has a rather strict release cycle where we
> generally do not add new functionality in a release branch (currently
> PHP-7.1, PHP-7.2, PHP-7.3), we have policies for keeping backwards
> compatibility and such. I'm mentioning this because an extension in
> PECL does not have these rules and extensions there are free to change
> exactly as they feel like. If the voting passes then naturally the
> Firebird foundation are free to claim it on PECL and essentially do
> anything you wish with it, it just will not be included in the php-src
> distribution anymore (which has less and less meaning nowadays with
> package managers). PECL even have Windows integration and can compile
> extensions in many flavors.
>
> > While I am sure existing users will do what they must to continue having
> > access to PHP drivers for Firebird, I would very much like to avoid
> imposing
> > upon them this inconvenience.  I also very much wish to avoid the
> negative
> > stigma of being demoted.
>
> I think it is just as important to not further distribute broken and
> unmaintained software. The PHP community deserves high quality
> extensions and tools for rapid development, this extension does not
> live up to those goals and criteria and it has not since before 7.0
> was released. That is a bad on the PHP Development Teams end, we tried
> to remedy the extension for as long as we could, but now we are at a
> point where its a burden to continue that, added with the low bug
> reports and feedback we have gotten, it is the best solution for us
> (again not speaking directly for everyone). Both ways you look at
> this, there is negative stigma involved as it currently stands.
>
> > This sends the wrong impression, especially since we have already been
> > making renewed efforts within the Firebird development umbrella to
> address
> > your grievances with the lack of appropriate maintenance of the
> > (ext/interbase) driver.
>
> My thoughts regarding sending wrong impressions have been expressed
> above. However I do honestly appreciate the effort about putting work
> into making PHP and Firebird communicate better, however it seems that
> the Firebird users who have voiced their opinion regarding this matter
> seems to almost deny PDO_Firebird is an actual thing in php-src, I
> reckon there was comments regarding it not supporting the same feature
> set as that of ext/interbase, perhaps a first task to look at if thats
> of interest.
>
> > The Firebird Foundation has even secured corporate funding specific to
> this
> > driver that remains available to ensure continued development.  This
> type of
> > funding allocation is the primary purpose of the Firebird Foundation so
> that
> > Firebird will have a core team of dedicated developers.  I would very
> much
> > like to see this funding go to its intended purpose.
>
> I'm not really sure what to respond to this, honestly. It is
> unfortunate as it currently stands, however I have expressed above my
> personal feelings as a Core Developer of PHP in regards to the actions
> done (and the lack of). The communication should be the top priority
> when there is money involved, but there seems to be the lack here like
> I expressed.
>
> > I am personally committed to see that an appropriate level of driver
> upkeep
> > is accomplished in order to maintain the continued presense of the iBase
> > driver in the core of PHP.
>
> Please se my comment about PDO_Firebird above.
>
> > Will you please let me know what assurances you require of us in order to
> > accomplish this?
>
> As the RFC author I'm not keen on disrupting the democratic process
> for this, even more so with how events have turned out lately. Firstly
> wanting to stop the RFC but no response or patches or even
> involvements prior to voting to even get me and the other team members
> and contributors some sort of assurance that its not just empty words
> and now halfway into the vote again, with what initially strikes me as
> someone who are not fully into the topic (I apologies if this is not
> the case, but that is the impression I got when reading the email) and
> the overall lack of involvement of Firebird in the PHP Development
> related areas (internals, mailing lists, bug reports etc) and
> therefore I see *no* reason as currently is, to halt the voting (like
> I expressed to Martin, Volker and Lester who has been voices of the
> Firebird community).
>
> > Thanks and kind regards,
> > Jason Wharton
> > Firebird Foundation President
>
> I would like to hear Firebirds standpoint on the issues at hand and
> why they come so late, I do not have an answer to this or even an
> imaginary one that I could think of to explain any of this.
>
>
> [1] https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate-and-remove-ext-interbase
> [2]
> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate-and-remove-ext-interbase#further_rationale
> [3] http://bugs.php.net/72175
> [4] https://externals.io/message/3673#3680
> [5] https://externals.io/message/80838#80920
> [6] https://externals.io/message/95172#95191
> [7] https://externals.io/message/31388#31448
> [8] https://externals.io/message/29469#29618
> [9]
> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate-and-remove-ext-interbase#introduction
> [10] https://firebirdsql.org/en/news/revival-of-php-driver-development/
>
>
> (I have included parts the original message that spawned this for
> internals readers for context.)
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Helen Borrie [mailto:helebor@tpg.com.au]
> > Sent: Thursday, April 11, 2019 1:40 PM
> > To: Jason Wharton
> > Subject: Fwd: Re: PHP Driver / Maintainer
> >
> > This is a forwarded message
> > From: Volker Rehn <vr@kimdata.de>
> > To: Helen Borrie <helebor@tpg.com.au>
> > Date: Thursday, April 11, 2019, 11:38:31 PM
> > Subject: PHP Driver / Maintainer
> >
> > ===8<==============Original message text=============== Hello Helen,
> >
> > hope everything is running smoothly in the Southern hemisphere ;-)
> >
> > I would like to give you an update on <subject>. The voting to exclude
> the
> > driver from the main php distribution has started (only people on the
> > php.internals mailing list can vote, http://news.php.net/php.internals)
> and
> > as expected it is not looking good:
> >
> > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate-and-remove-ext-interbase
> >
> > Today Martin has finally succeeded to get into the internal php-mailing
> > list, after he had contacted some guys of the core php team directly.
> Let's
> > see ...
> >
> > best, Volker
>
>
> --
> regards,
>
> Kalle Sommer Nielsen
> kalle@php.net
>
> --
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>
>

-- 
Chase Peeler
chasepeeler@gmail.com

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