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Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 16:47:28 +0300
Message-ID: <9c22c99010ba92136bb66adb873d1335@mail.gmail.com>
To: Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me>
Cc: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: RE: [PHP-DEV] RFC: Move phpng to master
From: zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrea Faulds [mailto:ajf@ajf.me]
> Sent: Monday, July 21, 2014 4:10 PM
> To: Zeev Suraski
> Cc: Nikita Popov; PHP internals
> Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] RFC: Move phpng to master
>
>
> We *could* make PHP NEXT in a year, sure, but it won't be worthwhile
being
> called PHP NEXT.

Everything I know about the PHP community, combined with the amazing level
of interest that the recent PHPNG benchmarks garnered, tells me that it
wrong.
People would love to get it even if it was just the performance & memory
footprint gains alone.  And we're not even talking about that - we'd still
have ample time to put in additional features into it.

> There are a lot of big changes we can and should make and
> that would necessitate delaying it. Three years might be a bit long.

Three years is a lifetime in our world of software...

> However, I
> am confident that we need more than a year to make this major worth it.

Even if it's going to be 18 months (which is on the upper limit of what I
think we should allow for .NEXT), I don't see a need for 5.7 in between.
When we created the release process RFC, from the get go, I thought that
releasing every 12 months is too frequent.  I was told not to worry and
that we'll "see how it goes" and "change if we need to".  Now, suddenly
this became a God-given commandment, that we must have a mini version
every year and on time - and it's not.  Reality is that the userbase is
embracing versions a lot slower than we crank them up - releasing 5.7 to
be followed shortly by 6/7 doesn't make a lot of sense, I think.

Still, I think we're much better off delivering .NEXT as soon as we can
as.

> > This is the assumption we should take IMHO, and only branch 5.7 (and
> > more importantly, invest time in it) if it proves wrong.
>
> Branching 5.7 wouldn't be a big effort. Master is fairly stable, and if
some RFCs
> pass, we can merge them into 5.7. It also gives us a fallback. If PHP
NEXT
> doesn't happen next year (and I expect that it won't), we'll still have
5.7.

I can live with that, as long as we treat 5.7 as a secondary project where
we backport stuff rom master, and as long as it's clear to everyone that
it may be (or IMHO may very well be) throw-away code that we'll never
actually use.  Personally I think it makes more sense to focus on getting
.NEXT out the door quickly so that we don't have to get into the headache
of working on two active trees, though.  I'd like to see what others are
thinking...

Zeev