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Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:07:45 -0700
To: Bill Moran <wmoran@potentialtech.com>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] My musings on problems I've had with the PHP community
From: ilia@prohost.org (Ilia Alshanetsky)

A few people had already given fairly clear reply as to why things  
happen the way they do, but since it seems are you still unclear  
about cause, I'll regurgitate the past comments once again. ;-)

First of all you should keep in mind that PHP is an open source  
project as is the case with many other such projects, people who are  
contributing their time and effort are volunteers. Thus they tend to  
focus on things that are interesting to them, such as the extensions  
they've written, components of the language they use for their day-to- 
day work, etc... So while there maybe a good number of "Core  
Developers" few may look at bugs in areas they are not interested in  
or feel they lack detailed knowledge about the workings of a  
particular code. As such few extensions have more then one author/ 
contributor/maintainer and most developers tend to specialize in  
various areas of the language.

There are certainly some components like the standard extension or  
the language core where there is more then one contributor, but  
generally each extension is being actively maintained by a little as  
one person or as many as 3 at the most. Unless the extension is  
abandoned by its author, other developers will as a rule not get  
involved in its development, unless previously cleared by the author  
to do so, or making a trivial change/fix. In the case of the SOAP  
extension, there is a fairly active maintainer (who also happens to  
be the author) who knows the extension the best and does his best to  
fix issues in said extension as CVS log will show.

I appreciate the frustration you may have with having a bug sit for  
some time and waiting for someone to examine it, even though it has a  
patch attached. That said most bugs do get fixed, especially those  
with patches attached to them. Some developers may wait till RC is  
announced before going through their bug queue, so that they can  
examine all outstanding issues in one go rather then look at them  
individually to save time, which can contribute to a slow response.

Ilia