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Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2023 09:31:28 +0100
To: Peter Kokot <petk@php.net>
Cc: internals@lists.php.net
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [VOTE] include cleanup
From: max+php@blarg.de (Max Kellermann)

On 2023/02/11 17:14, Peter Kokot <petk@php.net> wrote:
> I've voted in favor of the RFC because of the code-cleaning,
> tech-debt-reducing improvements to code readability.

Exactly my point, and I'm surprised by the resistance.

Not only surprised, but also disappointed that many have voted against
code cleanup, but where have those people been when this was being
discussed?

Matthew said there had been "chatter from a number of folks after the
changes were merged about builds no longer compiling", but was not
able to render that more precisely.

None of that was discussed on GitHub nor here on php-internals.  I
have to question whether these build breakages even exist.

(Other than the DTrace build failure which happened because one line
was missing, but that's a fact and not "chatter", and one bug reporter
and not "a number of folks".  Let's put this dead horse to rest.)


> BTW, merging from PHP 8.1 up is not problematic. Git diff only looks
> at a few lines of code above and below. Not the top of the file.

This was the only counter-argument ever discussed here, and I'm
puzzled that the imagination of merge conflicts scares so many people.
About a kind of change that is unlikely to cause one.

Any code change can cause a merge conflict, but include cleanups are
the least likely cause of all, because include directives are almost
never touched in bugfix-only branches.


Is that all, or is there another, yet unnamed reason why there's so
much resistance?  The hearsay about build failures?


There are 3 more days to vote, and it's a tie currently - means 9
"YES" votes missing for supermajority or else the RFC gets rejected.
That rejection would not only be a missed chance to modernize the PHP
code base, but also a sign to potential PHP contributors that the PHP
maintainers don't value clean code.  This is unsettling.

Imagine how this will overshadow future attempts to remove historical
cruft from a decades-old code base, because the counter-arguments
apply the same to any kind of code cleanup.  As any decades-old code
base, there's a lot of historical cruft in PHP which gets in the way
all the time, much more than a hypothetical one-time merge conflict.
Historical cruft keeps piling up if you don't keep cutting it down all
the time.

Cleaner code is easier to read and understand, which makes existing
bugs easier to fix and makes new bugs less likely to be added.  That
outweighs, in my opinion, all the possible disadvantages that the
process of code cleanup could possibly have, by orders of magnitude.

Max