Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:32803
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: error (pb1.pair.com: domain wayne.edu from 141.217.1.231 cause and error)
Message-ID: <4714462B.2060606@wayne.edu>
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 01:03:39 -0400
Organization: Wayne State University
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 (Macintosh/20070728)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: "Brian A. Seklecki" <lavalamp@spiritual-machines.org>
CC: internals@lists.php.net
References: <471423B1.9040207@wayne.edu> <20071015233753.G50776@arbitor.digitalfreaks.org>
In-Reply-To: <20071015233753.G50776@arbitor.digitalfreaks.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] My musings on... a Solaris test platform
From: ab5602@wayne.edu (Rob Thompson)


Thanks Brian,

I sincerely feel that many PHP developers have their hands tied in
several ways.  The least of which being that the reported bugs are often
not immediately and easily reproducible in a sane build environment that
is easily accessible to the developer.

To a developer who is voluntarily tasked with fixing a bug, their entire
environment is called into question or is suspect as being inexact.
This same issue does not exist for the bug reporter, who may post
reports with verbiage such as "look! look! it doesn't work!" and demand
restitution, back-pay, pay-back and public reprimand when the often
quirky, obscure, un-reproducible fix is not immediately submitted to a
time-tested and stable code base.

Both sides are understandable, however, it would be a benefit to both
parties to have some immediately accessible environments that are
up-to-date, hopelessly obscure in their own right, and offer the
developer a sane benchmark with which to base a prognosis.

Again, this idea may be a waste of time if this situation does not
exist, but I think it's workable.

-Rob

Brian A. Seklecki wrote:
> On Mon, 15 Oct 2007, Rob Thompson wrote:
> 
>> Hello,
>>
>> I've been thinking about Solaris support for PHP and some of the
>> difficulty surrounding reproducing bugs under different Solaris OS
>> versions, not to mention OS patch versions.
> 
> If you cant get traction feeding Sun-specific patches upstream, you
> should you should work with the Pkgsrc people.  Pkgsrc can save Solaris
> (in that Stabbing Westward sense).  See:
> 
> http://pkgsrc.habel.name/packages/SunOS-5.9-sparc/lang/
> 
> php-5.2.3nb2.tgz    2007-Jun-10 11:53:47    3.2M    application/x-tgz
> php-5.2.3nb3.tgz    2007-Sep-27 16:54:00    3.2M    application/x-tgz
> 
> http://www.pkgsrc.org/
> 
> They're experts at resolving toolchain and portability problems. 
> They're also not likely to turn down access to hardware for bulk-build
> machines.
> 
> Oh and bug reports wont get closed as "Won't fix" :)
> 
> ~BAS