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To: Kalle Sommer Nielsen <kalle@php.net>,
 Tobias Nyholm <tobias.nyholm@gmail.com>
Cc: Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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 <CAJW__o2p415R9Vnjc7rYhvN8BZJiZdi3MxBuQpCSNE6_BHYdjA@mail.gmail.com>
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Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2021 09:41:54 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Request for karma to vote on RFCs
From: pierre-php@processus.org (Pierre)

Le 18/07/2021 à 22:46, Kalle Sommer Nielsen a écrit :
> Hi
>
> Den søn. 18. jul. 2021 kl. 21.47 skrev Tobias Nyholm <tobias.nyholm@gmail.com>:
>> Hey.
>> I would like to get karma to be able to vote on RFCs. I understand that voting karma isn’t usually given out to people who write their first mailing list entry.
>
> I'm not comfortable with this if this is indeed your first person to
> internals. There was a similar concern with the maintainer of PHPStan
> a while ago, who while also have a large set of downloaded packages,
> did not participate in the internals community by actively taking part
> of the conversation at the time at least and the request turned out to
> be declined.
>
> -1 from me to prevent discrimination and keep it consistent.

Hello,

I don't have karma as well, and I sure don't have the legitimacy to 
represent anyone else but me, but I wouldn't feel comfortable if some 
would have gain voting right because they maintain a lot of community 
packages, and here's why:

  - For once, I'm writing PHP since PHP 3, and doing it professionally 
for more than 15 years, I wrote PHP code 8+ hours a day for the latest 
15 years (more or less), I'm one of the many silent users for which each 
language feature change will impact every-day's life. Maintaining open 
source community driven tools doesn't make their writers fundamentally 
better than the rest of us in programming, it just make them visible.

  - All those daily silent users doesn't always agree with community 
packages standards, style, design and direction, and that's legit, thus 
community maintainers cannot represent all the daily users. Regarding a 
community package, no matter how much it relies on community or users 
and feedback, will always see its final decisions under the hand of a 
few, which may not be representative (and for the best, since that the 
maintainer will have to maintain it, it's only legit to let him/her decide).

  - Proprietary code represents much more code in the end that 
open-source, most of us write proprietary all day long, at least as much 
code as we re-use community code.

I'm not comfortable with current voting process because all users can't 
say their word about the language features they'd really want to see, 
but on the other hand, the current voting process makes me safe because 
only people deeply engaged in maintaining it can vote, and they don't 
want their life to be harder, they want it to be a pleasure, which 
drives them to essentially make good decisions. And I can still express 
my opinion in this list, and I love PHP maintainers community for having 
allowed it.

Maybe what's missing in all that would be an additional voting process, 
not between people with karma, but a publicly opened one, like a survey, 
for which anyone could vote. Those surveys wouldn't count for the final 
decision, wouldn't have any "legal" outcome, but could give serious and 
solid insight for RFC discussions. It'd give an overview about what PHP 
users want and what they don't want or don't care about, this could 
actually change some decisions.

I really like the way everything happens, it's a solid process where 
only people that actually maintain or maintained the stuff can actually 
decide about what to maintain in the future, it's good. But maybe, in my 
opinion, it lacks one tiny detail: the global users feedback about how 
each decision will impact them.

That was my 2 cents.

Regards,

--

Pierre