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Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 15:09:45 +0100 (BST)
To: Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com>
cc: Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me>, PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: RE: [PHP-DEV] RFC: Move phpng to master
From: derick@php.net (Derick Rethans)

On Mon, 21 Jul 2014, Zeev Suraski wrote:

> From: Andrea Faulds [mailto:ajf@ajf.me]
> >
> > 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.

I think that's the cru - and very important. I would totally be in 
favour with PHP 7 be "just" PHPNG - as long of course it's finished. 
Whether this takes slightly more than a year, I don't really care.

> > > 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...

I agree. We should not focus on two active trees.

cheers,
Derick