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Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2014 13:37:33 -0800
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Subject: Voting karma (Was: Re: [PHP-DEV] [VOTE] 64 bit platform improvements
 for string length and integer)
From: aharvey@php.net (Adam Harvey)

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On 31 January 2014 13:21, Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> wrote:
> I have to add something here.
>
> Many of the people voting on that RFC have never ever contributed as much
as
> a single line of code into the PHP source tree, and a couple have
literally
> contributed low-single-digit patches.
> Incidentally, as far as I could tell, all of them[*] voted in favor of the
> proposed changes (i.e. source compatibility breakage).
>
> Even though having non-code-contributors makes a lot of sense for
decisions
> regarding the language's features and we built in support for it in the
> voting RFC, in my opinion, it makes no sense at all for people who have no
> stake at the development of the language's source code to weigh in on how
> that code is written. Personally I didn't expect we'd be voting on things
> like that (implementation style) back when I was involved in the voting
RFC,
> but perhaps it's time to amend it a bit.

I've said this before on IRC, but I'll say it here too: I'd like to go a
step further than that and tie voting in general to karma. (I'd even go
another step and say "karma + making active contributions in the last
year", but that might be too open to gaming.) In that case, the only votes
that would count for the int size RFC would be people with Zend karma.

The idea of giving the non-Internals community a voice is a good one, but I
don't think the haphazard way we're doing it now benefits anyone, and this
situation has been brewing for a while: a change that is a worthwhile one
on the surface, but which the majority of developers who actually have to
maintain the code don't want. We've probably been lucky to make it this far
without it happening. We need a better way of determining quality than
"everyone with a VCS account for anything on git.php.net or
svn.php.netgets a vote", to put it bluntly.

Adam

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