-----Original Message-----
From: Rasmus Lerdorf [mailto:rasmus@php.net]
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 2004 5:42 PM
To: Naik, Roshan
Cc: internals@lists.php.net
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Unfulfilled promises... forever experimental
extensions... all over againHopefully belts will be tightened up around the extensions and the
responsibility taken up by their authors.Wow, that was quite a rant from someone who hasn't contributed a damn
thing.
Really ? Are you sure ?
http://www.zend.com/zend/week/week146.php
Even if I were someone who never contributed anything to php
and is just a user of it ... does my concern or that
of thousands of others in the same boat count at all ?
From that stmt one can only infer I guess they are all non-entities.
This is not a community culture but a detrimental coterie culture.
People volunteer their time and effort to this project. There are no
guarantees that any of this code won't make your cpu melt or
cause your
curtains to catch fire. Ranting at a bunch of volunteers is utterly
useless and counterproductive. If you have a genuine
interest in seeing
things improve, get involved. Pick your favorite extension that is
troubling you, talk to the authors and other users and figure out what
needs to be done to solve its remaining issues. If you do that, your
words might mean something.
Precisely the attitude expected (indifference and excuses),
as was pointed out concisely by another user.
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=php-dev&m=103161229529458&w=2
The central point that these features never made it to
production quality previously and that no reason to believe the
new cool features advertised may meet the same fate
is overlooked and left unaddressed.
And as to what Andi wrote:
Thanks for this quite useless and unproductive email.
I suggest to inform yourself slightly better on the tons of improvements
the PHP development team have made and where we are today vs. 4 years ago.
I suggest next time, if you want to be productive, you can contact us with
a concrete problem and proposed solution.
So that's not a concrete problem ? The proposed solution as I mentioned
is to start tightening things up where too much things have been lax.
And you get me wrong, I am not saying PHP5 is worthless and there are
no useful features. There are clearly many nice improvements. Users
simply like to see those things completed before shipping them.
My intention is not to point fingers at people. It is to point finger at
problems. A response that either refutes the existence of the problem
or the affirms the existence of the problem and how (if at all) can
be tackled is a more appropriate response. Rather than the usual "buzz-off"
As the above quoted user posted...
"Nothing prevents us from treating people with patience and courtesy.
Except of course bad manners and bad attitude."
In theory everything can be marked experimental... the zend engine (object model
changed) and other the core parts too. But a certain quality level
is indeed being enforced upon, even today, before its made available
as a release quality product.
Another solution is to leave such "not-yet-ready" things out in the other
extension repositories, allow them to mature and stabilize there
before shipping it with a standard distribution. That way there
is an incentive for authors to complete their work and this encourages
competing implementations. The healthy competition also enhances
quality of the components in the product.
The best one gets to be part of the standard distribution...
a nice reward for the efforts. Rather than rewards first
and work later (if he got a chance).
-Roshan
"Nothing prevents us from treating people with patience and courtesy.
Except of course bad manners and bad attitude."
Posting this quote in this thread is beyond ironic.
George
Wow, that was quite a rant from someone who hasn't contributed a damn
thing.Really ? Are you sure ?
http://www.zend.com/zend/week/week146.php
Ok, one self-serving fix.
Even if I were someone who never contributed anything to php
and is just a user of it ... does my concern or that
of thousands of others in the same boat count at all ?
No, not really. Your complaint is basically one of process and whether
experimental extensions should be widely distributed. We don't include
extensions by default unless we feel the usefulness outweighs the hassle
of the fact that it may not be completely finished and tested on every
possible platform. Sometimes it takes a while to get it right as well for
the more complicated extensions. That's just the way things go.
The central point that these features never made it to
production quality previously and that no reason to believe the
new cool features advertised may meet the same fate
is overlooked and left unaddressed.
You are right, there is no guarantee that our code won't make your
curtains catch fire. We don't actually write code for you. We write code
for ourselves and happen to share it with you. If you think that is an
excuse or a brush-off, then fine, you probably should give up on any and
all open source projects because in the end this is how most of them
operate.
And you didn't propose a solution. Telling us to "tighten things up" is
not a solution. "You suck. I propose that you stop sucking!" Well,
thanks, that's helpful. Whether an extension is marked experimental is
actually quite arbitrary and different developers have different criteria.
It is nearly impossible to force a single set of criteria on people that
specifies what "production-quality" is. I deploy plenty of extensions
marked experimental on some of the busiest web servers in the world. Does
that make these production-quality? In my particular case it does because
they meet my particular criteria, but in another environment they may
indeed blow up badly.
So, how about proposing an actual solution instead of pissing off the very
people who you will need help from to improve things? This solution may
be a set of general criteria an extension has to meet to leave its
experimental state, a set of test tools, or a group of developers that you
convince with your obvious social skills to contribute to this effort.
-Rasmus