PHP User Survey

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 12:27 PM, Florin Razvan Patan <florinpatan@gmail.com

wrote:

Hi Paul,

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 10:00 PM, Paul Reinheimer preinheimer@gmail.com
wrote:

Hi All,

My apologies for the intrusion, I'll keep this brief.

In many discussions over the past few months there has been talk about
what
the community at large needs. Pierre said just earlier today:

"I would also say it us time for us to get back in sync with the
communities needs. I am not talking about the last days RFCs but in
general."

The other point that comes up is the difficulty in reaching a large
portion
of the community. They don't come to conferences, they don't sit on this
list, they don't go to user groups. They work with PHP for months or
years,
but the rest of the "community" doesn't even know who they are. I believe
Rasmus has mentioned this on a few occasions.

So my suggestion is simple, let's ask them: What they want, What they
need,
how they installed PHP (source, rpm, deb, provided by hosting provider,
Zend Server), etc. Let's create a survey, and link to it prominently on
php.net. I considered just writing a survey myself, but even if
everyone I
knew tweeted it I'd still lack the reach to hit those outside the
traditional community.

While this is clearly not a suggestion to change PHP, i'll write this up
in
RFC format if there's interest. Should give people an opportunity to
discuss questions and such.

thanks for your time
paul

--
Paul Reinheimer

Thank you for championing this. I've been promoting this kind of
feedback for a while now.

Just like the discussion I've had earlier on the IRC channel, I do
believe that when proposals are made/are at a point where the
internals don't agree with which solution is better and it should
affect the community at large, it would be better to just ask the
community and see what they want/agree on. The issue would
be that in some cases one side would lose but the same thing
happens when the debate is done here, on the mailing list, and
a solution doesn't satisfy some people and ends up being the
standard for the whole community.

These votes shouldn't be seen as a must but should serve more
as a guideline.

As for the problems raised by Kris, I think that a simple system
based on the e-mail address of the voter with some prior
confirmation / pending approval, like for the mailing lists, should
be enough to grant the right to vote or not. Even if some people
were to have multiple accounts, I don't think they'd go to the
trouble of spawning a very large number of e-mail addresses just
to see their favorite option accepted.

I'd be more that happy to provide any help possible for the RFC
as well as the survey / surveys themselves.

Best regards.

Florin Patan
https://github.com/dlsniper

--

Agreed on all of your points, Florin. Perhaps the three of us can make
this a collaborative effort if everyone's willing.

--Kris

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 12:35 PM, Christopher Jones <
christopher.jones@oracle.com> wrote:

Hi All,

My apologies for the intrusion, I'll keep this brief.

In many discussions over the past few months there has been talk about
what
the community at large needs. Pierre said just earlier today:

"I would also say it us time for us to get back in sync with the
communities needs. I am not talking about the last days RFCs but in
general."

Hi Paul,

My thesis is the other way round. More people in the community need
to become PHP core developers. This is historically how PHP
development has occurred, since nobody has idle time to adopt projects
they are not 100% behind.

Increasing user involvement is easier (and more often) said than done.
I'd prefer to see effort spent mentoring, rather than running surveys.

I do have a lot of reservations about a survey. But if you do run
one, I'm sure I'll look at the results.

Chris

--
christopher.jones@oracle.com http://twitter.com/ghrd
Newly updated, free PHP & Oracle book:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/php/
underground-php-oracle-manual-**098250.htmlhttp://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/php/underground-php-oracle-manual-098250.html

--

I agree that we need more core devs (myself included), but I think it's
worth remembering that most PHP developers are not programmers who would be
comfortable working in ANSI C. The point of a survey would be to guage
what PHP users want. Whether or not we choose to act on that would be up
to the actual core devs, but at least we would have some helpful data on
what the average PHP developer would like to see.

We could probably mitigate your concern (and please correct me if I'm wrong
on this assumption) by making it clear in the RFC that these survey results
are completely non-binding and intended for informational purposes only.

Hi Chris,
On Feb 20, 2013 9:36 PM, "Christopher Jones" christopher.jones@oracle.com
wrote:

My thesis is the other way round. More people in the community need
to become PHP core developers. This is historically how PHP
development has occurred, since nobody has idle time to adopt projects
they are not 100% behind.

We have more new active contributors than ever before. Actually the top 5
contributors are here for less than a couple of years or even less than one.

Increasing user involvement is easier (and more often) said than done.
I'd prefer to see effort spent mentoring, rather than running surveys.

Having our user at large express their needs or opinion is about
contributing. It is actually the very first step to contribution.

I do have a lot of reservations about a survey. But if you do run
one, I'm sure I'll look at the results.

I do not have a single doubt. Why? Surveys are one of many ways to get
feedback. They have no contracting values but give us some numbers about
one rfc or another. That may help us to focus on one feature instead of
another if we see a large number of users looking forward to it.

Cheers,

Hi Paul,

My thesis is the other way round. More people in the community need
to become PHP core developers. This is historically how PHP
development has occurred, since nobody has idle time to adopt projects
they are not 100% behind.

Increasing user involvement is easier (and more often) said than done.
I'd prefer to see effort spent mentoring, rather than running surveys.

I've suggested this very thing in the past and even with a framework
(albeit only in an email thread), I think a mentoring program of sorts
would really benefit the core team.

It could even be kept in small groups where 1 mentor dedicates to answer
and/or find the answer for a group of 1 to 2 people who are keen on
learning to help with the core.

I would think that a separate mailing list for this type of mentorship
would probably make sense, just to keep the chaffe off the internals
list to a minimum.

It would take some (at least 1) of the current core developers to step
up and commit to helping. I ran into a lot of trouble learning what I
know about the core and most of the tough question I had went unanswered
for one reason or another, was quite infuriating at the time.

I do have a lot of reservations about a survey. But if you do run
one, I'm sure I'll look at the results.

--
-Clint

hi,

I was in a van with my son-in-law yesterday and we got around to discussing
websites and the like. I run his sites, but HE uses Joomla, so although it's
PHP he has no interest in the language as such as long as Joomla works. So
this morning I though 'What ARE people using with PHP?" expecting to see a
large chunk of the 90 odd % of websites actually using PHP to be using
something to hide that, and got something of a surprise ...
http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all
makes interesting reading, and so while I was anticipating that a large
chunk of users would be excluded from 'PHP' related questions, the reverse
seems to be the truth?

We have discussed that hundred of times in the past. However let me
try to compare with other mainstream products, in an understandable
way:

a company A delivers materials to a cell manufacturer > The
manufacturer sells ready to be used cells to end users. End users do
not care if the cell use a chip from Company A or B as long as it
works.

the manufacturer reports needs&feedback to the company A, based on its
customers feedback and needs

PHP is the company A, Joomla/Wordpress&co are the cell manufacturers.

Cheers,

Pierre

@pierrejoye