Rasmus wrote:
Really ? Are you sure ?
http://www.zend.com/zend/week/week146.php
Ok, one self-serving fix.
I was (again) expecting exactly that kind of response. I dont
understand why so much arrogance exists among a select few. And
it unfortunately reflects the community's attitude.
So nobody till date or in future will benefit from the fix right ?
A self-serving fix may be today. But a problem waiting to happen
on other platforms anytime(if not happened already).
But lets leave that issue off to the side, its a red herring as
far as the central issue here is concerned.
Rasmus wrote:
So, how about proposing an actual solution instead of pissing
off the very
people who you will need help from to improve things?
I dont beleive all the people are being pissed off. They are just
not speaking up their concerns (given up hope?)
I dont see why anyone pointing out a problem is pissing you off.
Perhaps then every individual filing a bug report
should be pissing you off too. They should be asked to
go fix it themselves...and not bother anyone here as they are
not part of the "inner-circle" or "the community".
Rasmus wrote:
Some don't contribute anything, but they
are still part of this community. By being part of the community you have
a voice and through our extremely open approach you can easily contribute
your code and ideas.
In theory. But clear evidence to the contrary here.
Rasmus wrote:
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.
I am glad to see a slight progress from "please bring up
concrete problems" to "please bring up actual solutions"
I already proposed a couple solutions in my 1st and 2nd emails.
Please review them again. More solutions will come once people
take up the problem seriously.
Thomas wrote:
Actually, MS has a responsibility to make money, and as you said, there is
no way get everybody over to FF.
Also it is not entirely correct to say that no one behind
the curtains of PHP internals isn't making money off of PHP.
Some do some dont..directly or indirectly. But this topic is also a
red herring to the central discussion. So lets leave it alone.
Rasmus wrote:
Then you better put on some protection, because this isn't going to
change. Like I said, we develop software for ourselves, not for
customers.
Not all opensource projects suffer from the same
problems that PHP (more accurately a select few here)
is exhibiting.
As the previosly quoted user said ....
<quote> "Open Source" is a philosophy. It shouldn't be an excuse. </quote>We welcome contributions, but we react rather badly when
people come along and demand that we volunteer more of our time.
So far no one demanded to volunteer more time. Just requested
to prioritize things that more important, higher.
In much of the propaganda about PHP5 I read, Did i read anything
outright calling out the fact that "php5 is not backward compatible" ?
no!
Nor did I see anything that said, "hey we have these new features,
but you have to fix them before using them". If someone else
in "real life" did that to you... you would be upset too.
PHP releases seem to be driven more by whats important for the "oomph
factor" to make a big splash. Clearly something has to be learnt from
the other lowly languages.
In another mail (about apache2 support) I saw PHP's virtues being extolled
as "PHP is the glue". And that its strong point is that it allows users
to tie all kinds of disparate functionality ( xml , image editing, etc )
together.
The quality of most of that "glue" and its usefulness is being question.
And some evidently dont like it.
Andi wrote:
I suggest we stop this thread now. It's just taking up time we could use to
more fruitfully in improving PHP. Please move any further rants off the
internals mailing list and keep them personal.
So these are all "useless rants" and wont improve PHP ? I hope its a personal
opinion. This is a nice way to snub off concrete problems.
Andi wrote:
I do think that if there are some concrete suggestions to be heard that's
fine, but try and keep it short, to the point, and constructive.
So none of the suggestions were constructive ? or perhaps you didnt
read them.
Andi wrote:
Personally, I agree that the "Fix it yourself" argument is not a good one
and isn't always relevant
Acknowledged several times before...but agressively misused till date.
Andi wrote:
, but if you'd look not at what developers say
after you piss them off with such emails,
Why does it piss them off ? What is "such emails" ? This is nothing personal.
A select few are indeed taking it personally. But I dont beleive this
reflects the community at large.
This is purely bringing up an issue that is a problem in "real life" and
is not a problem for "the experimenting engineer".
Andi wrote:
but how the PHP development team
has worked in real life,
Thats a blanket generalization...to the point of aggressive ignorance and
silly complacency.
This is nothing but a "real life" problem we are talking about.
So far.. some people seem to be interested in attacking peripheral issues
like ... "you didnt contribute a damn thing" ...."this is a useless rant"
"nobody is making money here" ..."fix it youself" ..."not a good quote"
... "thats a self-serving fix"
In another 2 years (on the 6th epxerimental birthday for sockets )
and PHP6 is released, everyone will have forgotten about what
PHP5 didnt deliver ...or even less of what PHP4 promised & didnt deliver.
Somebody will again notice the repetition of promises
and point it out ... and get snubbed.
Such snubbing off is the prime reason why most people prefer to
stay quiet right now. I remember aggressive (but weak) justifications
to why PHP's OO model was the right way for PHP .. and now here we are!
Hiding (in the bowels of documentation and source code)
the fact that the "banner features" are not ready
... is dishonesty. Lets not do that.
-Roshan
Oh boy, if you don't see the difference between "concrete suggestions to be
heard that's fine, but try and keep it short, to the point, and
constructive" and the email you sent then it is really preferable to
everyone here for you to stop emailing this list.
Andi
Roshan,
I have to say I agree with many of the points you're making, and
disagreeing with quite a few as well. Since I do agree with Andi that for
whatever reason, this thread has turned non-constructive, I won't reply
point by point.
The main point I agree with you about is that it doesn't make sense for
extensions to stay tagged with 'experimental' status for years and years,
as long as experimental means what it means today. And today it means at
least one of two things (a) unstable, and (b) API subject to change. The
key problem, the way I see it, is with (b). It's not realistic to tell
people that they cannot rely on APIs that have been available for two years
because nobody bothered to update the extension status, or because it was
'dumped'.
IMHO, we need to add a few more statuses. I believe that most of the
experimental extensions fall under only one of the above categories, and we
should make it clearer. Doing something along the lines of giving each
extension some sort of stability rating, maybe based on user feedback and
maybe just based on the gut feeling of the author, and separating the 'API
subject to change' from it, would make good sense.
I strongly and strictly disagree with you as to what the developers should
spend their time on. I'm not sure what the person who said 'Opensource is
a philosophy, it's not an excuse' had in mind when he said it, but there's
one thing you cannot do when you get something for free - and that is
demand. Whatever someone chooses to give you is solely at their
discretion. And if someone feels great spending his time working on
optimizer 0.000001% of performance in soundex() instead of fixing bugs in
mysql_connect(), the only things you can do about it are (a) email
internals@ politely, hoping to get someone to do you a favour and fix it,
or (b) find someone that will do it for you, for a fee.
At 00:14 27/08/2004, Naik, Roshan wrote:
[snip]
Hiding (in the bowels of documentation and source code)
the fact that the "banner features" are not ready
... is dishonesty. Lets not do that.
None of the 'banner features' of PHP 5 is in an unusable state at this
point. There's no dishonesty there. At best, if some are still tagged
experimental, it means our system is not that good yet.
Zeev
I dont beleive all the people are being pissed off. They are just
I didn't even bother reading past this line, and I'll be surprised if
anyone else responds to this because chances are you've already been
filtered out of existence. You're demanding, confrontational, make no
attempt to understand the environment under which you are trying to get
something done and worse of all annoying the hell out of us all.
So yes, it's pissing me off too.
You walked through the door trying to fix one thing -- you'd like to see
some extensions in PHP get their experimental status removed. The
reality of the situation is that they're that way for a reason most of
the time and if you don't like that -- well, there isn't a damn thing
you or I can really do about it besides change it ourselves. The author
of the extensions are the ones who really are responsible for those
changes so you should be contacting them directly with your complaints
anyway. No one is really "happy" with the idea that some extensions are
in this state, but most of us have a full-time job we attend to during
the day and then hack on making PHP better when we have the time to do
so. If you don't like those rules go use ASP -- I'm sure Microsoft has a
great support contract for a few thousand dollars a month where they
will wait on your demands.
You aren't going to get anywhere with this so just drop it. There are no
promises that something will or will not happen in open source, there
isn't any promise that anything even works. The bottom line here is this
is YOUR problem, not mine or Rasmus' or anyone else's here on this
list and you need to start treating it that way. You could have gotten a
lot farther just asking what you could do to help get those extensions
out of Experimental and doing it. Chances are if you would have gotten
some help along the way too.
Learn some interpersonal skills -- especially with people who owe you
nothing.