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Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2019 21:32:27 +0200
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To: Rasmus Lerdorf <rasmus@lerdorf.com>
Cc: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Evolving PHP
From: nikita.ppv@gmail.com (Nikita Popov)

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On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 4:11 PM Rasmus Lerdorf <rasmus@lerdorf.com> wrote:

> Lots of drama on internals lately. Not that different from 15-20 years ago.
> A couple of things to keep in mind for everyone.
>
> It is not that hard to write a tool that perfectly fits your own needs and
> people who are very similar to you in terms of skillset, background and
> overall experience. What PHP has always strived to do is to be much broader
> than that. Writing a tool that is very approachable to beginners that can
> still scale to some of the largest sites in the world is a much harder and
> more interesting problem and requires some compromises on both ends.
>
> The people writing the code get to call the shots, for better or worse. In
> the beginning I called all the shots. As more people started to contribute
> it took me a while to let go and accept contributions I didn't agree with.
> We wouldn't be here today if I hadn't done that.


Thanks for chiming in Rasmus. A few brief thoughts on recent discussions:

 * The RFC process encompasses language changes (breaking or non-breaking),
as well as policy and process decisions. We have a very wide selection of
precedent cases that affirm this.

 * The "undefined variables" vote that sparked the current controversy
currently sits at 29 in favor of exception and 20 against. That's
significantly below the acceptance threshold for RFCs. Things are working
as they should: The question has been discussed, put up to vote, and the
vote has decided against this course of action (as of this writing, though
I expect this to be representative of the final result.)

 * If people still feel that the acceptance bar for RFCs is too low, it may
be increased through an RFC. In fact, we already did so this year, which
was great. If anyone wants to pursue this, I recommend raising the
threshold in general, as defining what constitutes a "significant"
backwards compatibility break is fairly hard and will be prone to argument.

 * As a personal failure, I should have made the voting option for "undef
vars throw exception" be "undef vars throw warning in PHP 8 and exception
in PHP 9", which would have provided for a long-term migration timeline for
affected code. I apologize for pushing an unnecessarily aggressive option
here.

 * Discussion threads on this mailing list have been very unpleasant
recently. I am unwilling to actively participate in them in this form. This
is bad for everyone, but particularly for opponents of proposals. It means
that we cannot establish the necessary discourse to explore improvements or
alternatives. The recent propensity to suppress certain discussion topics
entirely, as well as the use of overwhelming quantity to disproportionately
push a position, contribute to the unproductive discussion environment.

Regards,
Nikita

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