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Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2013 19:07:40 +0200
Message-ID: <ed57fd83c51e81bd75facb6e8bdea4f7@mail.gmail.com>
To: Clint Priest <cpriest@zerocue.com>, Peter Cowburn <petercowburn@gmail.com>
Cc: Pierre Joye <pierre.php@gmail.com>, PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: RE: [PHP-DEV] Voting periods
From: zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Clint Priest [mailto:cpriest@zerocue.com]
> Sent: Monday, January 28, 2013 3:15 PM
> To: Peter Cowburn
> Cc: Zeev Suraski; Pierre Joye; PHP internals
> Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Voting periods
>
>
> On 1/28/2013 6:12 AM, Peter Cowburn wrote:
> > On 28 January 2013 12:03, Clint Priest <cpriest@zerocue.com> wrote:
> >> If you're still worried about this making it in, don't worry. Nikita
> >> and I have given up, to the determinant of the community.
> >>
> > Then please close the voting.
> Since there is no "maximum voting period" and 5.5 is not in a feature
freeze yet,
> I left the voting open, in case some people decided to read the patch
and change
> their minds.  I see no reason to close the vote unless I'm required to
do so or the
> game is up.

I think there's an almost-consensus that voting periods need to be well
defined.  Two reasons:

1. If you care enough about it you should be able to vote about it within
one or two weeks.
2. Leaving it open ended gives the RFC proposer too much power.  He could
simply end the vote once it happens to reach the necessary majority.

So I'd say yes, you're required to end it, either immediately or at most
at the end of the two week boundary.

> asking for this feature (present in every other modern
> language) for 5+ years.  I spent two years going through the *tedious*
RFC
> discussion process, wrote the software, Nikita made it even better to
have it
> shot down without even reasonable explanations as to why "from most
people."

There are two very reasonable explanations, and it's fine you may disagree
with them:

1. It makes the language more complex.
2. It makes the language more difficult to maintain.

In both cases, the people who opposed it thought that the gain from adding
it doesn't outweigh these loss in complexity and maintenance overhead.

> Some are resting on the idea that the ROI isn't there just aren't
listening to the
> community.

The vast majority of the PHP community is a silent one;  These people
don't participate here on internals;  They don't attend conferences;  They
use it - the vast majority of them in a professional manner - and they
picked it because they like it the way it is, not because of what it needs
to become.  For every person that subscribes to internals, there's a
thousand (yes, a THOUSAND) people who don't (it's several thousands vs.~5
million).  In fact, they're not completely silent.  They speak in volumes
- PHP 5.4 is used in less than 1% of the sites using PHP today, and even
the relatively revolutionary 5.3 is still a lot less popular than 5.2.
The new shiny features are not all that interesting for most people.

The community that participates in internals isn't necessarily
representative of the community at large.

Zeev