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Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2007 03:09:31 -0700
To: Pierre <pierre.php@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] POSIX regex
From: zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski)

At 00:21 17/07/2007, Pierre wrote:
>Hi Andi,
>
>On 7/16/07, Andi Gutmans <andi@zend.com> wrote:
>>I disagree with this view of the world.
>
>Well, we seem to all agree on this view, but let forget this
>unsignificant fact :)

Pierre,

I wanted to send my 2c even though I'm not really involved in 
internals@ any longer - because in reality it doesn't really have 
much to do with such decisions.  internals@ makes decisions that 
effect the entire PHP userbase.

We all need to remember that the people on this mailing list are not 
close to something that represents the userbase.  We do have some 
very opinionated people on this list, some of them with a lot of 
commit-karma - which are not very open to feedback from regular 
users.  I'm not saying I represent the PHP userbase, and I don't 
think Andi is saying this either - but both of us try to take the end 
user's view when we think about stuff like this, as opposed as the 
internals@ PHP developer view.  I would go as far as saying that I 
think we do it (as well as some others, like Rasmus) more so than 
some others on this list.

For that reason I suspect that if you moved the discussion to, say, 
php-general - you'd see a much more balanced view of the 
world.  Unfortunately it will probably not be very 
manageable.  Something more practical would be trying to think about 
things from the end users perspective as opposed to our perspective 
as the developers and maintainers of the language.

Finally, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, we always need 
to remember that BC breakage accumulates, and it's not binary.  Every 
cleanup we do in PHP 6 will further slow migration, and as Andi 
pointed out a few days ago, things don't look too well as it is.

As for ereg - especially in light of the discontinuation of PHP 4 we 
shouldn't even consider removing it in PHP 5.  I agree with Andi that 
I'm not sure it's a good idea for PHP 6 either, but I'm not sure it 
isn't either.  As long as it's easy enough to turn it back on (i.e. 
have it bundled but disabled) I think it's not unreasonable.

Zeev