Hi,
It has been now over a year since 7.0.0 was released. A lot hard work was
invested into PHP 7 then, many things flew in. The patch handling was quite
permissive, so that we were able to compensate the remaining porting debts,
fix many porting bugs and even add several new features. As part of that, we
also had to realize, that many extensions have lack on active maintenance.
For this and other reasons, quite a few things that flew in, were indeed
really close at the border of our release process principles. IMO, this
handling was justified. In first place, PHP 7 is a huge break through, and
in the end we nevertheless have a balanced codebase which is already
successfully used in production by many today.
But given this, how it seems to me today, the permissive handling should
come to the end point for the 7.0 branch. Of course, 7.0 is still in the
active phase, so any bug fixes and even small features should be fine and
welcome. But the key point should be now indeed the strict compliance with
our release and stability rules. 7.0 is now a usual stable branch, and it is
worthwhile to keep it so. That's why I'm writing this mail - to ask all the
active contributors for agreement on this, if it sounds plausible. Note, it
is not, that I'd want to point a finger to someone allegedly breaching
something. Totally not, my intention is just to depict the facts being
"captain obvious" and to trigger some thoughts on the topic. Whereby indeed,
as we lately merged quite a few long standing PRs, it made me to think about
it and to come to the general conclusions I've listed.
Now, that 7.1 is released, it can be seen as a middle ground. Certain, that
issues with RM consideration need or stability concerns will be delightedly
handled by Joe and Davey. For 7.0, the order of the day should be, to handle
patches some more selective. This way, it would be possible to keep things
stable while not losing the PHP 7 impetus.
Any feedback welcome.
Long live PHP 7 :)
Anatol